


Naming Shadows

by Serriya (Keolah)



Series: Pandora's Dimensional Gateway [2]
Category: Greek and Roman Mythology, Norse Mythology, Vampire: The Masquerade, Werewolf: The Apocalypse
Genre: Action/Adventure, Aliens, Alternate Universe - Science Fiction, Cigarettes, Cybernetics, Dreams, Genetic Engineering, IN SPACE!, Language Barrier, Multi, NaNoWriMo, No Canon Knowledge Required, Organized Crime, Psychic Abilities, Psychic Squid, Robots, Romance, Vampires
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-11-01
Updated: 2009-11-30
Packaged: 2017-11-14 13:26:07
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 50,079
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/515686
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Keolah/pseuds/Serriya
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Melissa Omega is a genetically engineered cyborg, made and trained to serve the galactic government. What happens when she decides that she disagrees with how the government handles things?</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Gov Is Mother, The Gov Is Father

**Prelude**

"I've never told anyone about my life before," Melissa said. "Well, at least not the truth of it, anyway. Never trusted anyone enough, you know? I never knew just who might be working for the government."

Sixshooter looked over at her and grinned wryly. "So, you trust me, huh?"

"Implicitly," Melissa said, propping herself up on an elbow to smile at the Glass Walker.

"All part of my irresistable charm, I'm sure."

Melissa laughed lightly, leaning over to kiss him fondly. "Most definitely," she said coyly.

"So tell me about it," Sixshooter said. "Unless you'd rather do something else with those lips."

"Well, alright. I'm not really much of a storyteller, though. Don't expect this to be the next great bestseller or anything."

"Just poke me if I start to fall asleep or anything. I wouldn't want to miss out on any of the good bits. Like the porn."

Melissa snickered softly. "Wouldn't want to disappoint you or anything, but I'm sure there will be less of that than you might hope for."

"Aw, damn."

* * *

**Part 1: My Life As a Science Experiment.**

I was born in a laboratory. My earliest memories were of lights. People staring down at me intently, taking measurements, poking me with things. I now realize that that was when they were putting in my first implants, when everything became clearer and easier to process, as it were. I didn't quite understand what they were doing, though. Not yet.

The lab was a clean, sterile place, but I wasn't the only child there. I remember playing with the others. They gave us puzzles and building blocks, things supposedly intended to spur creative development and logic skills. There was a boy in my group who could put together a jigsaw puzzle in minutes. I didn't see him again, after we left that place.

We were three years old when we were taken to a different place. We went on a spaceship, and I didn't understand that we were going to another planet. We all filed into the shuttle, like miniature soldiers in uniform all in a row, and up we went.

The kids in the group tried to figure it out. "We're going in an airplane," one of them said.

"Nuh-huh," said another, a girl called Casey. "It's a rocket. Airplanes point sideways. This one's pointing up."

We landed in a docking bay and were taken to our quarters on the ship. The spaceship was huge. I have no idea how big. But we had to walk through what seemed like miles of corridors, to a three year old at least, before we got to where we were staying for the trip.

They had all the children in my group assigned to bunks with a common area full of toys and games, but it wasn't long before a couple of us got bored with it and wanted to explore the ship. It was me and Casey, along with one of the larger boys, by the name of Gordon.

"Hey, Gordon," Casey said. "Lift me up to the panel. I wanna try to get the door open."

Gordon lifted her up onto his shoulders and she reached up and tried poking at the door panel a bit. After a couple minutes of that, however, we realized that it wouldn't be quite so simple. My eyes wandered, drifting about the ceiling, and something else caught my eye. There were slatted coverings in the ceiling.

"Hey, look," I said. "What about those?"

Casey looked where I was pointing, frowning thoughtfully, and said, "I wonder where those go? But how are we going to get up there?" She slid down off of Gordon's shoulders and we looked around the room.

I noticed that one of the duct openings was close to the bunks, and pointed this out to them. "We could probably reach that one," I said.

The three of us climbed on top of the bunk nearest to the vent opening and tried to reach it, but it was something of an awkward placement as it wasn't completely over the bunk and mostly opened over air. When Gordon got the cover loose, it fell to the floor below with a clatter. This caught the attention of several of the other kids, who came over and wondered what we were doing.

"We're going to see what's up here!" Casey said. She grabbed onto the lip of the duct and tried to pull herself inside, but slipped and wound up hanging by her fingers from the opening. "Ack. Help."

Gordon and I grabbed onto her and helped push her inside, then the two of us climbed up ourselves. It was dark inside the ventilation duct, and noisier than I had expected. Our every move clattered and echoed around us, and there was a low thrumming sound of fans and machinery in the distance.

"I wonder where this leads?" Casey said as we crawled off down the shaft.

The ventilation ducts were a maze of twisty little passages, all alike, and without our implants we might have never been able to find our way back to our bunk room. Of course, we didn't realize at the time that the adults had already discovered we were missing and were trying to find us. The shafts were far too narrow for a grown human to fit through, but for a three year old, there was plenty of room to move around. Gravity felt weird up in the shafts, and it seemed to shift a little as we moved along from one place to another. It was a little disorienting.

We travelled on for what seemed like ages, and eventually came to an opening into a room with blue lights. "What is that?" Casey whispered.

"What?" I said. "I can't see." I peered over trying to get a look, but I couldn't see anything from where I was besides the blue light streaming up through the slats in the duct cover.

Casey was already working the cover open, and it fell to the floor with a clang. I winced, wondering who might have heard it that time. She dropped down into the room below, and Gordon went after her. I crawled up to the opening and peered down myself, finding a shelf up near the opening that we could climb down.

"What is this place?" Casey said.

The entire room was cast in blue light from a line of upright tubes leading from the floor to the ceiling. There was some sort of fluid inside, swirling, and each tube had a thing near the middle where, I suppose, people could regulate the flow of the liquid. I had no idea what it might be for.

Casey went over and reached for one of the regulator valves. There was a symbol on the tube above the valve, and I didn't recognize what it meant.

I said, "I don't think you should touch that."

"Why not?" she said.

"Might be like the shower. Spray all over and we'd get all wet."

"Oh, fine," Casey said, disappointed. "Let's go see what else we can find."

The three of us climbed the shelf-ladder back up into the ventilation shaft and began exploring again. Just as well that we left the room alone, as I later realized that the tubes were coolant regulators for the ship's primitive nuclear engines. I'm sure that later on, panicked adults were going over the place carefully to make sure we hadn't accidentally screwed anything up.

After crawling about the ducts for a while longer, we eventually came to another opening that smelled strange. It was like nothing I'd ever smelled before, and Casey, curious as ever, was quick to open up the cover and climb out of the shaft. I heard her cry out for a moment then hit the ground with a thump. I guessed that there wasn't anything to readily climb down on the other side here. Gordon went down after her, and I looked down out of the shaft opening for a few moments before climbing out.

This room was very different from the others I had seen. It was open, and there were warm lights hanging from the ceiling. All around us, there were plants. I had never seen plants before, and wasn't entirely certain what they even were at first. They were arranged in row upon row of shelves, each containing nearly identical plants, but I picked out several different varieties as I looked.

"This must be where they get food!" I said, putting two and two together and recognizing their resemblance to things I had eaten.

"Do you think so?" Casey said, examining the plants. "They smell kinda like food. But they must change it a lot on the way."

We didn't get a chance to muse on the mystery any further at the time, however. The door at the far end of the room opened and several adults rushed in. "There they are!" they said. "Thank goodness you're alright! Never do that again!"

Even as we got shuffled back to our quarters, we all knew that wasn't the last time we would attempt any sort of mischief. But the ventilation duct covers in the children's area were sealed much tighter after that, and that means of escape was closed to us for the moment.

* * *

**Interlude**

Sixshooter said, "You were crawling through ventilation ducts at the age of three? Getting started a bit early on the cliches, were you?"

Melissa chuckled. "Hey, everybody's got to start somewhere."

* * *

**Part 2: It's All Fun and Games Until Someone Loses an Eye.**

Some weeks later, we arrived at our destination. The planet was called Eusebes, and although I heard the name a few times, it didn't really connect to me at first just what this meant. We were taken down in the shuttle again to a new facility. It didn't look at all like the old one. It was bigger, and less sterile, and instead of all being in one big building, this was a lot of smaller buildings with open areas in between. The sky was blue and bright. I remember staring at it for a long time, impressed with the sheer size of it. At the time, I thought it was a huge dome over the colony, with a bright light that turned on and off to indicate when you were supposed to be sleeping.

They had plants, as well. Tall trees growing along the walkways, grass-covered lawns that they let us out to play in, fragrant bushes heavy with flowers. I didn't understand what the flowers were for, as they didn't look or smell like anything resembling food. The first time I saw them, I tried to eat them, but decided that they didn't really taste very good. It was all something of a shock to me, to be in a real living colony rather than an enclosed laboratory, isolated from the world.

We had a school and actual lessons now, and not just playing around with supposedly educational toys. I think it was because we were no longer just experiments now. We were students that they had invested time and money in, and our younger years had proven our usefulness to them. Whatever criteria they were watching for while we played with their blocks and puzzles, we apparently had passed.

They taught us reading, writing, mathematics. Most of us caught on very quickly. There were a couple kids in the group who didn't quite manage to catch on to some things as quickly as the rest of us. After a couple months in, they were taken away, and we didn't see them again. As we learned more, they kept teaching us more and more. Geometry. Calculus. Physics. They got us to calculate the trajectory of a thrown ball, and if we caught it, we got treats. They were all games to us, and we all strove to be better, to try to be the best in the group.

Some of them were more vicious about it than others, though. There was a girl in the group by the name of Tharpie. Oh, Tharpie. Heh. I imagine you'll be hearing a fair bit more about her, but this is where it started. I hadn't really taken much notice of her before, although she'd always played a little differently than the others, she wasn't outright disruptive enough for the adults to take notice of her and take her away or something.

We were supposed to be trying to catch balls. Tharpie would throw them as hard as she could at the other kid's face. Sometimes she'd grab a rock instead and hope they didn't notice. Usually, the kid caught it anyway. Once, a boy failed to react fast enough and caught a rock smack in the face. The adults rushed him off, but we didn't see him again after that.

I asked her, "Tharpie, why did you hit Ander with a rock?"

"He wasn't fast enough," she said. "It's not my fault."

"You might've hurt him," I said. It didn't really occur to me that he might have been killed.

Tharpie said, "So what? If they can't keep up, they shouldn't be here. Didn't you hear the grown-ups talking? We're the best! So who's going to be the best of the best?"

I said, "That's no excuse for being a bitch."

"What did you call me?" Tharpie asked.

"A bitch."

She said, "What does that mean?"

I said, "I don't know. I heard one of the adults say it and it didn't sound very nice."

"Well, you're a bitch, too, then," Tharpie replied. "A bitchy bitch. Go bitch at someone else."

What's so funny? Yeah, so we must have been about four years old at the time, and we already had the term down pat. And I'll hardly deny being a bitch at times, anyway. Heh.

We stayed at the Eusebes colony until we were twelve years old. The group had dwindled a bit by this point, but there were still over thirty of us effectively graduating that day and moving on to our real education. They made a big deal out of it, lining us up in our uniforms and calling our full names. I hadn't really thought about it much until that point that we all had the last name of Omega, while the adults had a wide variety of surnames. I didn't really understand what a surname was for, so I didn't think this was unusual.

"Acacia Omega," the announcer called out first. Casey went up, grumbling about her name. She always hated when people called her by her real name.

One by one they went down the list of names, and then they came to me. I went up and stood proudly at attention, snapping off a smart salute to the woman, and she handed me my piece of paper and dismissed me. I was pleased as could be as I went down to sit with the rest of the graduates, at least until Tharpie's name was called and she went over to sit next to me. Poking me just to be annoying.

The ceremony ended soon enough and we broke off for cake and punch. There were brightly colored balloons and streamers hanging around the room, and I wasn't sure what they were supposed to be for. We'd never had birthday parties or anything of the sort.

Casey said, "I wonder what will happen with us now. Do you think they'll take us somewhere else?"

"I don't know," I said. "They kept mentioning some sort of training. They want to teach us _more_ stuff? Haven't we already learned a lot to begin with? I want to go out and _do_ something already."

"Like what?" Casey asked.

"I don't know," I said again. "See new things. Meet new people. Go places. Do stuff."

Our exposure to the outside world had been limited and very carefully regulated. The few times that we were actually allowed to watch the news, someone invariably wound up rushing in to turn it off the minute something objectionable was mentioned. Even by that point, I could tell that they were already hiding things from us. The galaxy was a big place, and not under as tight of control as the government would like. But at this point, the government was still the big, mysterious They to me, and I didn't yet know just who They was.

I didn't realize that it wouldn't be long until I'd find out for myself.

* * *

**Interlude**

"What was so funny back there?" Melissa said.

"Oh, just remembering when Trigger learned what not to say around the metis cubs," Sixshooter said.

Melissa chuckled softly. "I can imagine. I never met him, but he sounded like an interesting sort." She looked off thoughtfully at nothing in particular. "I wonder what ever happened to some of those kids who didn't make it through the program."

"That early on?" Sixshooter said. "They were probably just reassigned to units with lower requirements. Front-line grunt work, if they couldn't handle the high end stuff."

"You think so?" Melissa said. "Heh. There were times when I imagined them being shoved off into the recycling chutes for disposal, or dissected on a table in a lab just to see what had gone wrong with them."

"Nah," Sixshooter said. "Well, maybe that kid that got hit by a rock. But generally, not, I'd imagine. No sense putting the effort of making you guys to waste, after all."

"So glad you think I'm indispensible," Melissa said with a crooked grin.

* * *

**Part 3: Military Ethics 101.**

The lot of us were taken up aboard a spaceship again to another planet. This was a very different, and far less pleasant, one. Machimos was a dismal place, covered in thick black clouds, and the sun rarely showed its face on the surface of the planet. The only green plants to be found were inside the greenhouses and hydroponics bays. Outside, only a delightful variety of lichens and molds could be found.

Although most of our caretakers were military types, we were soon introduced to our primary teacher, who was a civilian. He was a scrawny, balding, middle-aged man wearing a suit. I remember wondering just what sort of uniform that was he was wearing, and what branch of the military it denoted him as belonging to. Sure, I'd seen people before that were in civilian clothes, but the suit just looked like a uniform to me that I didn't recognize.

"Greetings, students," he said. He had a bit of a stutter. "I am Mr. Ian Woon. I will be your teacher in the matters of social education." One of the boys had his hand up, and Woon looked over to him and said, "Yes, young man?"

"What do you mean by social education, Mr. Ian Woon, sir?"

"First off," Woon said, "I'm not an officer. I'm not even in the military. I work for a living. I'll have none of this 'sir' business."

The boy replied, "Sorry, s-- um, Mr. Woon."

"Anyway," Mr. Ian Woon went on. "I'm here to teach you kids about history, culture, literature, entertainment, customs and traditions, religion and philosophy, and in general, entirely too many subjects for one person to be expecting to cover. While I'm doing that, you'll have a whole slew of military types out there eager to teach you how to shoot at people."

In hindsight, I kind of have to pity poor Mr. Woon, even as I spent a lot of time loathing him for his lessons. The greater part of the budget had been spent toward teaching us how to be killing machines, while he alone was there to teach us how to be human beings.

I didn't quite know yet just what he was talking about by shooting people, however. It didn't take long to find out. We were shuffled out to a training field underneath too-bright lights trying to illuminate the black day. We stood in a row at attention as a uniformed man stomped out, inspecting us.

"Is this sorry lot the best that they could send me?" he shouted. "Snivelling children, a sorry excuse for soldiers?" He got up in the face of the boy on the end and yelled, "Do you want to go back to your mommy, soldier?"

"No, sir," the boy replied quickly. "I have no mother."

"Wrong. The program is your mother. And you'll all do your best to serve her to the best of your pathetic ability. You will obey your superiors, no matter what they ask of you. Is that understood?"

"Yes, sir!"

"Good. I am Lt. Ajax. You may call me 'Lt. Ajax', 'Lt. Ajax, _sir_ ', or just plain ' _sir_ '. Understood?"

"Yes, sir!" we all echoed.

That was when our training really began. Everything up to that point seemed like fun and games in comparison. The dichotomy between going from Woon in the mornings to Ajax in the afternoons was always something of a culture shock, but if nothing else, it helped us get used to working in two very different worlds without missing a beat. Sometimes they mixed up the schedule a bit, and we were sent off to study with people other than Lt. Ajax, to learn different things, but usually for the next four years, it was those two that we saw the most of.

I remember Mr. Woon's classes. He took his job to heart and tried to teach us everything he could, and in the end, they were probably more important than anything else I learned there.

"Hypothetical situation," he would say. He set up a lot of these. "You've been assigned to a town. There's civilians here. Women. Children." He paused, looked at us, and clarified. "Ordinary women and children. The town is threatened. You don't have enough support to hold off the attackers. What do you do?"

"Try to evacuate the civilians?" Casey suggested.

"A well enough thought," Mr. Woon said. "Who would you evacuate first?"

One boy said, "The children, of course. They're the most vulnerable."

"No," another disagreed. "You should try to get the adults out. They'd have the best chance of actually making it."

"You can always get more children," someone else added. "The adults have already had years of training. They're more valuable."

Mr. Woon was cradling his forehead in his hands as they talked. "What have they been teaching you?" he muttered. "What have _I_ been teaching you? While some of your points are valid, they're valid for all the wrong reasons. Yes, Melissa?"

I said, "It's impractical to take only the children. It's unethical to leave them behind to be slaughtered. Evacuate the families together. That'll keep them all calm and working together most smoothly."

We understood the emotional bonds of a 'family', even if we didn't quite understand what it had to do with biology. We considered our group to be a family. We were encouraged to form emotional bonds with our classmates. Sometimes this worked out a bit better than others. There were some of us that just didn't quite get along as well with others.

"Now, say evacuation isn't an option. What else could you to besides evacuate them?" Mr. Woon asked us.

One kid said, "Try to hold the town with what we had and hope for the best?"

"No, that wouldn't work," Casey said. "We should gather some intelligence on what sort of forces the enemy has. Sabotage them if possible. Misdirect them or delay them long enough for backup to arrive."

"Rally the civilians," I suggested. "Arm them with whatever was available."

"Very well," Mr. Woon said. "Picture this, then. You've done what you can to delay the enemy. Your sabotage acts have weakend their forces and destroyed some of their tanks. You've managed to arm the civilians in the time you've bought, and the thirty of you stand with the entire adult population of the town against the enemy. You're still outnumbered and outgunned. The odds are unlikely but not hopeless. How many of you would stand in the face of death to defend complete strangers?"

Some of the students raised their hands. One boy in the back of the room asked, "What were our orders?"

Mr. Woon held up a finger, and said, "Yes, put your hands down, students. A pertinent question, to be sure. The difference being, were your orders to save the town, or to stop the enemy? Or were you unable to receive any at all? Let's assume that you were out of communication with headquarters and unable to receive orders regarding this specific situation. What do you do, and why?"

Someone said, "We shouldn't sacrifice ourselves for these people. We're more valuable than them, and our superiors would be angry if we were killed pointlessly."

"What makes us more important or valuable than them?" I asked. "They're human beings."

"But aren't we better than them?"

Casey said, "Physically and mentally, yes. But that means we should be protecting them, not sacrificing them to save ourselves."

Mr. Woon said, "Casey and Melissa are correct. You are stronger, faster, and smarter than them. But you were, when it comes down to it, created to protect and serve. That does not mean that you should throw your lives away wantonly, however. It all comes down to a judgment call, primarily the judgment of whoever is in command of your unit. When your commander issues an order, whether you like it or not, the rest of you must follow suit to the best of your ability, even if it means certain death."

That was how he spoke during our first couple years there. Always high ideals, but obedience and loyalty above all else. But somewhere along the way, his tone shifted. I don't know what happened to embitter him so, but it came to a head during our last year there, when we were sixteen.

"Hypothetical situation," he began. "You've just received an assignment from your superior officer. You are to infiltrate a colony and assassinate a target, quietly and without arousing suspicion if at all possible. You're to make it look like an accident. Tragic, but unfortunate. Your target: A little boy. Eight years old. What do you do?"

The students thought about this for a bit. "Study the target," they said. "Learn his habits. Watch what he does and where he goes. Pay attention to who else might be watching him."

"Wait," a boy named Gabriel put in. "Why are we being asked to kill this particular target? Is he some sort of gene-mod like ourselves? A cyborg?"

"You aren't privy to that information," Mr. Woon said. "You are expected to obey without question. You are not given explanations."

"Still, Gabe has a point," said another student. "We should assess his abilities and threat level. It's always good to know what to expect."

Mr. Woon said, "So far as you can tell, he has no particular superhuman abilities."

"So, why?" I said.

"You are not privy to that information!" Mr. Woon snapped.

A student suggested, "He might have seen something he wasn't supposed to. He might have information that needs to be kept quiet at all costs."

"But why would he need to die for something like that?" Casey said.

Mr. Woon said, "Did you ever wonder what happened to your fellow classmates? The ones who didn't make it as far as you did?" We all stared at him in silence. "Reassigned, they called it. Euphemisms. You're the product of a highly classified project. They wouldn't allow one hint of it out of their control. You don't know what happened to them. I don't know what happened to them. Does it bother you to think that your former friends might have been killed simply to avoid existence of this project even potentially getting out? Just because they didn't meet up to their standards?"

Tharpie said, "They weren't good enough. Why should it?"

The rest of us said nothing. We didn't know what to say. His original question was entirely forgotten for the moment.

Mr. Woon said, "No. I ask too much of you. At the heart of it all, when it comes down to it, you must be human beings, or everything we've worked for has been pointless. You will mourn for your comrades, because you've been taught to see them as the only family you've ever known. But will that stay your hand when it's the life of a complete stranger that is at stake?"

Casey said, "We should be protecting the innocent, not murdering them."

"Rightly so," Mr. Woon said. "Would you contradict your orders to do what you believe is right, instead? How many of you would do so?"

Only three of us out of the entire class dared to raise our hands. Myself, Casey, and Gabriel. Mr. Woon looked us over silently for a long moment, assessing us thoughtfully, before he spoke again.

"Hold your hearts close, my children," Mr. Woon said. "You're still human. But even if you have misgivings, you must obey regardless, or life will become very unpleasant for you. There may still be hope yet. You are the future. My time here is done."

That was the last class we had with him. We had expected some last exam before our studies finished with Mr. Woon, but we didn't see him again after that day. There was whispered speculation among some of us that he might have been 'reassigned', said with wide eyes and only now understanding the euphemism that had been used. The only thing that could be considered a final exam for military ethics came from Lt. Ajax.

We were all lined up, dressed up smartly in our uniforms, and we were assigned sidearms. Then we were taken off to a large, gray building to the side of the colony. We'd never been there before, but people who had gone in there didn't come out again. It was a prison.

"You will each be assigned to a prisoner," Lt. Ajax told us. "You are to ask their names and get their confessions for their crimes. Then you are to terminate the prisoner once a full confession has been made."

Casey spared me a brief look, and I could tell what she was thinking. What if they were innocent? It was only a brief look. We remembered the words of Ian Woon.

Each of us was taken off to a different cell, and they were carefully sealed, so we couldn't see what the other students were doing. There was an elderly man in the cell I was assigned to. He was a scrawny, withered old man, who looked up at me with tired eyes.

He said, "So they've sent children to do their dirty work, now?"

I asked him, "What is your name?"

"John," he said. "John Douglas." He looked straight at me. Tired, but still defiant. "Get it over with, girl. My time is through."

"I'm going to need to get your confession," I said.

"Confession," he snorted. "I didn't do anything that should warrant dying over. But I should have known better. I should have known the pay was too good to be true, and the contracts that they had me sign when they brought me here. Maybe there was something in them that I should have read more closely. But here, you see? I've been here for twenty years. I just wanted to make sure that my granddaughter would have a better life. And this is the end that they put me to."

I started to open my mouth to speak, but he interrupted me.

"No, don't say anything. I don't need your sympathy, and I don't want you to get in any trouble because of me, either. You look a little like her. Like how she might have looked at your age. Blonde. Blue-eyed." He shook his head. "But no. You don't need to hear the ramblings of an old man. You need my confession. Fine then, you'll have it. I'll confess everything.

"I said some things that I probably shouldn't have. I criticized the government. I criticized how they were doing things here. I said that I thought President Kennedy should step down from office. That she's hardly doing anything, and she's overstayed her welcome, and what ever happened to elections, anyway? But nobody mentions her much anymore, and it makes me wonder just what's really going on. And I wondered and criticized a bit too much aloud, and to the wrong ears, and so I wound up in here. There, there's your confession. I'm guilty as charged. Sedition. Subversive speech. Treasonous leanings. Don't question them, girl. Save yourself. Do what you must."

"Guilty as charged," I repeated hollowly as I raised my gun, and fired.

* * *

**Interlude**

"So you killed him?" Sixshooter said. "Just like that?"

Melissa nodded, glancing away. "Didn't really have much choice in the matter. I never did even find out who his granddaughter was. And I liked Mr. Woon. I hope nothing bad happened to him either."

"Eh," Sixshooter said. "Probably died of old age after spending another fifty years teaching."

Melissa raised an eyebrow. "You don't think they 'reassigned' him for saying those things?"

"They probably _told_ him to say those things. Make sure that any of you that were still having any doubts would obey anyway. Then they put you through that test to make sure you'd listened."

"We didn't see Gabriel again after the test," Melissa said darkly.

"Ugh," Six said. "If he was feeling like being heroically defiant even under something that was obviously a test, I can't imagine anything good happened to him."

"I can't imagine that everyone had as easy a time with their 'subjects' as I did. I don't think the poor old guy would have lived much longer even if I hadn't had to kill him, the way they were treating him."

"The more I hear about this government of yours, the less I like of it," Sixshooter said.

"You haven't heard the half of it yet."

* * *

**Part 4: Along Came a Spider.**

When we got out of the prison and back to our quarters, Casey and I exchanged looks, as we wondered what had happened to Gabriel. We didn't need to speak what we were thinking. We already knew what we suspected and were afraid of. Casey looked a little disgusted about the entire matter, but she hid it and continued to play along, as did I.

The rest of us, minus Gabriel, were taken aboard another spaceship again, leaving behind Machimos and its dismal colony unlamented, but this time the destination wasn't another planet. Our next stop was a space station in orbit of a barren world, turning slowly in space. The station wasn't new. It looked as though it might have been one of the first space stations built outside of the Sol system. After my last few years on Machimos, I hadn't thought anything could get any grungier.

When we got aboard the station, we filed up in a line in uniform for inspection. A woman came along and looked us over. She wasn't a tall woman. Small, slight, nimble. Short, dark hair cropped closely to her head. And she wasn't wearing a uniform that I recognized. It was all black, with silver trim and markings, stripes along the sleeves and collar. A uniform I'd grow very familiar with over the next few years.

"So, you're the group they've shackled me with," she said. "At ease. Quit staring straight ahead. You all look very fine and smart there standing at attention, but that's not going to get you anywhere in the real world. You've got pay attention." Without warning, she moved faster than I'd seen anyone move to slap a boy in the face. "Look behind you." Suddenly she was behind another student, lightly touching his back.

I was stunned. I'd never seen anyone move so fast before.

The woman chuckled softly and stood in front of us again, straightening. "Welcome to Tartarus Station. I am Rika Suzuki, but to you, I will be Arachne."

We had classes with Arachne intermittantly. Sometimes we would see her every day. Sometimes we might not see her for weeks at a time. I didn't realize at the time that she wasn't just a teacher. She was actually one of the seven people who ran the galactic government. Arachne was the head of the covert operations division.

But at the time, she was a role model for me. I admired her and wanted to emulate her. I wanted to be just like Arachne, and learn how to do the things she could do. That was how I acquired my original codename. Shadowcrawler. Because, they said, I was always creeping along in Arachne's shadow.

I remember a conversation I had with her once. "You want to be like me, do you?" she said. She seemed more amused than anything else. "You've got a long road ahead of you, kid."

"I know," I said. "But I'm prepared to travel it."

"You don't know the half of it yet," she said. "I know I make it all look easy, but when it comes down to it, it's a lot of work, and training, and practice. And you can never let your guard down for a moment, because you never know just who might be out to kill you."

"Even here?" I said.

"Especially here," she replied.

I looked at her in confusion. I didn't understand what she meant. I glanced from side to side, as if expecting to see ninjas pop out of the shadows at any moment. Arachne just grinned at me.

"Keep your senses sharp," she said. "See a flicker of shadow. Hear a shuffle of feet. Feel a slight movement of air. Smell a man sneaking up on you from a mile away."

I sniffed at the air. "I don't smell anything."

Arachne said, "Did you know you can tell a lot about a person by what they smell like?" She chuckled. "You've gotta learn to pay attention to everything. Even the smallest thing could be vital to success -- or survival."

Later on, she caught me trying to take her advice to heart. Trying to be attentive, keeping my senses alert for every little thing. She just snuck up on me and tapped me on the shoulder, causing me to jump in surprise.

"Not attentive enough," she chided me. "Or too attentive to the wrong things." With a crooked grin and not a further word, she vanished again.

I learned, though. All of us in that group were very intelligent and quick to learn, but there are just some things that implants can't teach you. All the book study in the world won't make up for actual hands-on experience. And -- hey, that's not exactly how I meant that. You are _such_ a dog. But I adore you for it. Hehe.

Anyway. I remember our psychic studies. Those were 'fun'. We were supposed to be learning how to resist and counter psychic attacks, so we had a handful of psychics lined up in the room trying to throw us off while we used the various techniques they were trying to teach us to keep them from messing with our heads.

Tharpie was overly enthusiastic, but terrible at it. "You do your worst, head shrinkers!" she yelled at them. "You can't pull one over on me!" She waved her fist at them, then clutched her head and began shrieking, and fell to her knees. I think it was around that point that she earned the name 'Banshee'.

I was good at resisting psionics, but it was Casey who was probably the best in the class at that. She was implacable. Once, all six of the telepaths tried bombarding her at once with each of their powers. Casey just stood there, calm as could be, with this placid expression on her face as if nothing could possibly move her in the world.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw movement. A flicker of shadow, a breath of air, and Arachne was behind Casey. There wasn't time to speak, or even to move. I just looked at Casey, trying to warn her. And Casey moved. She spun about, and slipped away from Arachne's touch.

Arachne just grinned, and gave a gesture to the psychics to lay off. "Very good," she said. "But I think you were warned." She glanced over in my direction. "I felt that, you know."

"Felt what?" I said in confusion.

"Heh," Arachne said. "You didn't even realize what you did? We've been teaching you how to deal with psychics, but we haven't actually taught you telepathy. And I know your implants aren't tied up into the network yet. You were intended to defend against telepaths, not to _be_ telepaths yourselves."

"I'm not a telepath..." I said.

Arachne just chuckled. "We'll see," she said. "We'll see."

She had us thoroughly tested, but much as we tried, none of us could make a connection between any others except me and Casey, and us two only with one another. Even then, it wasn't so much real telepathy as pure thought and intent, no images or words, just immediately intuitively knowing what the other was thinking. Arachne seemed very curious about the entire matter, although almost disappointed in the results.

Nonetheless, they encouraged Casey and me to become very close. I think they were intending on us becoming permanent partners or the like. I'm not entirely certain what they had in mind. But things were a little awkward at first. Yes, I know what you're thinking. I'm getting to it. Heh.

We were moved out of the communal bunk areas and assigned to more private quarters. It was a little strange to me, as I'd never really been alone for any period of time before, but while most of the kids were assigned to individual quarters, I was paired up with Casey.

"This is weird," Casey said, looking around the room and going over to sit on the bed. A real bed, and not a bunk, wider than we were used to.

But we didn't need to speak. Our thoughts and emotions were intertwined and inseparable, resonating with one another in perfect unison. I went over to her and sat next to her, and put an arm around her waist.

"Casey," I said.

"I know."

I realized I could hear her heartbeat. I could feel her breath, and the warmth of her body. We didn't need to speak. We just felt that the thin layer of clothing separating us was too much, so we stripped it all off and curled up under the sheets next to one another. It felt so good, and so right.

What, you want more details? Hey, I didn't say we actually _did_ anything. That's all there even was. We just slept naked next to one another. Hate to disappoint you.

That lasted for a far too short, blissful while. One day, Arachne took her off, saying, "We want to see how far away you can sense what is happening to the other."

We were experiments again. They were testing us. She took Casey to the far side of the station, and it was still clear as day. Then they took her out on a shuttle around the system.

"They're out in orbit of the gas giant," the scientist said to me. "Can you feel anything?"

"Not really," I said, shrugging. "Not that that means much. There just might not be much going on to feel."

"Hmm," the man said thoughtfully.

A few more moments of calm, and then, a jolt of pain shot through me. I cried out involuntarily in surprise. "What the hell are you doing?" I demanded.

"Interesting," was all he had to say.

With each jump came another surge of agony, and I screamed and raged at the scientist sitting passively in front of me. I struggled against my restraints, and by the third such test, actually managed to pop them loose enough to break free. My rampage didn't last long, however. The scientist calmly hit me with a tranquilizer, and I dropped out cold.

A couple days later, Arachne came in front of the class and said, "Today we're beginning your lessons in pain tolerance. I'm sure this will be a most pleasant experience for most of you, but you'll much appreciate it should you ever be captured and tortured for information, or become injured and need to continue your mission regardless."

Tharpie grinned smugly, and said, "Hah. Another chance to prove which of us is really the best at something!"

That turned it all into a competition. We all wanted to prove that Tharpie was the _worst_ at everything. So we each went in eagerly and without complaint. They started off simple enough, but became positively brutal after a while. They taught us techniques to cause pain without permanent injury, and had us practice on one another. Some of us, I think, enjoyed it entirely too much, from one side or the other.

Arachne particularly enjoyed assigning me and Casey to torture one another. I think she enjoyed watching that in her own twisted way. But then there was this one time that things got a little out of hand...

Casey was restrained, face against the wall, naked. Arachne stood by, watching us intently. I couldn't even tell you now whether or not there was anyone else in the room at the time. Whenever I caused her pain, I'd feel a backlash in myself, and I'd begun to really relish it.

She started off crying out begging for more, telling me to do my worst. The pain clouded my mind, and as it went on, I became blind to the fact that she had started screaming for mercy, and then just screaming outright wordlessly. Arachne stepped in, trying to pull me away, but I threw her off. Moments later, the world went black. I think they tranquilized me again.

I woke up sometime later. My mind was hazy. I must have been heavily drugged. I didn't know what had happened. I heard voices, vaguely, at the edge of my perception, speaking. I don't think they realized I was conscious enough to hear them.

"How long should we keep her under for?"

"At least until the other girl recovers."

I was relieved. Casey was alright. I didn't bother to try to listen to anymore. I just let myself drift back into sleep again.

Sometime after, I came to alertness again. Arachne was above me, saying to the nurse, "The drugs are taking effect?" She looked down at me. "Ah. There you are. Rise and shine, Shadowcrawler. You've got a lot of work ahead of you."

The nurse removed the tubes from me and I got up, clutching my head dizzily. "What happened?" I asked.

"You lost control and went into a blind, violent rampage, attacking everyone and everything in sight," Arachne said with a smirk.

"I don't remember that," I said.

"Yeah," Arachne said. "We tried to put you down. It took us three tranqs before you went out."

"It did?" I repeated numbly. "I'm sorry, I don't know what happened."

Arachne shook her head. "Don't worry about it. It's my fault, really. I let the situation get out of control. But you're definitely going to have to learn to control yourself better. We can't have that sort of thing in the field."

"Casey," I said. "She's alright, isn't she?" I realized that I could not even tell this myself.

"She's fine," Arachne said. "Come along."

The lessons became even more vigorous and brutal. Whatever was taught to me, the rest of the class had to learn, and now, we were all learning how to stay calm and focused no matter the circumstances. Naturally, Tharpie was not doing so well at it as usual. I'm sure she must have only barely met their minimum requirements. It wasn't like she was doing far worse than the rest of us. Just that if Tharpie was doing better than someone, they tended to take it as an indication to work harder at it.

I was alone in my quarters at the end of day cycles, however. Casey had been assigned to her own quarters. I was told that this was so that she'd have a chance to recover, but I hadn't even had a chance to speak with her during or between lessons. I also slowly realized that I couldn't sense her anymore.

Finally I decided to take matters into my own hands one night, and snuck out of my quarters in search of hers. Once I found them, I crept inside quietly. She was curled up in bed, sound asleep, and for a moment I wasn't sure I wanted to disturb her.

Casey woke with a start, as though sensing me in the room with her. "What are you doing here?" she demanded.

"I wanted to talk to you," I said, approaching. "I wanted to make sure you were okay."

"Get away from me," she said, cringing and curling up in a fetal position.

"Casey?" I said.

"Leave me alone!" she cried.

I stared at her for a few moments longer before reluctantly slinking back to my own room, staring at the floor all the way. I curled up in bed, never feeling so alone in my life, and too stunned to even cry.

I barely spoke with Casey after that, and I'm fairly certain that they put us both on modified drug regimens to keep us emotionally stable throughout our training. Because we had to deal with one another for another four years after that. But from then on, she was just there. Just another body in the training room. A severed connection. I couldn't feel her anymore, so it was just like watching a video. A flat image, with no real substance. Not really real.

I went through the next few years like a drone.

* * *

**Interlude**

Sixshooter shook his head. "Man, that really sucks what happened with you and Casey. Here I was hoping for some hot lesbian action and everything."

Melissa chuckled softly and curled up next to him. "Such a dog," she said fondly, leaning over to kiss him. "Well, that's about it for my early life. I'm sure there might have been a few interesting points here or there that I missed, but I'm sure that I covered everything particularly pertinent or relevant to anything else."

"And you didn't even get laid," Six said. "That's one lousy stretch of teenage years, to be sure. They must have had you on all sorts of hormone suppressants or something. All those drugs they had you on messing with your head."

"Probably something or other of the sort," Melissa said, shrugging. "I never really asked. But hey, I can make up for it all now, right?" She grinned at him. "And who better to do it with?"

"Yeah, I'm the best. What do you say we take a break and put the next chapter on hold for a bit?"

"Sounds good to me."


	2. All's Fair in Love and War

**Part 5: The End of an Era, the Start of Another.**

Ah, where were we? Right, I was going to tell you about my first real mission. See, we didn't exactly graduate from our training with any sort of pomp and circumstance. First, Arachne disappeared for about a month, and when she returned, we were all shuffled off hastily to different parts of the galaxy with hardly enough forewarning to say goodbye to one another.

My mind cleared as the drugs slowly left my system, and I could think sharply and clearly for the first time in years. I woke, and I could think. I was in a small craft, tucked away in a sleeping closet. I pulled myself out, and found that the ship was so small it didn't have any gravity. We'd been trained to work in zero-G, of course, but I wasn't used to it and it was a little disorienting at first. I went out toward the cockpit.

"What's our ETA?" I asked.

The pilot on duty glanced up at me. "Ah, you're awake. I was wondering if you were going to sleep away the whole trip. Sorry this ain't no luxury liner." He chuckled. "We've got a long haul ahead of us. It'll be a month before we arrive in the Corialis system."

I gave a short nod, and asked, "Weren't there any other ships that could be spared?"

The pilot snorted. "It's been a mad scramble to try to get everyone into place as it is. The real ships are already on the front lines. You may as well make yourself comfortable. Pull up a harness, have a tube of space rations, and enjoy the view of hyperspace. The name's Tuomas, by the way. They didn't bother telling me your name."

"Melissa," I supplied. "Is there anyone else aboard this ship?"

"Just the engineer," Tuomas said. "Skadi. That's Skadi, not Scotty. Norse name, and she's a she, and she's my wife."

"Oh," I said. "This is a private ship?"

"Yep," he said. "So if it's all the same to you, I'd prefer if you didn't tell me anything you'd have to kill me over, kay?"

"Right," I said. I went over and strapped myself into a seat. I wasn't sure if I was looking forward to a month spent in zero-G. I hadn't been expecting to be travelling through hyperspace in a small ship. Hyperspace was a little disorienting to me because there wasn't any feeling of motion. At least in normal space, there was acceleration to give gravity and feeling of movement. Hyperspace was just a bit unreal.

"You've probably never heard of the Corialis system," Tuomas said. "It's way out in the edge of explored space. Even further out than Tartarus was. I'd never heard of it myself until I got this contract. They've got a station out there I'm supposed to take you to."

"I see," I said. "What this you said about a mad scramble? What front lines?"

Tuomas looked at me oddly. "You mean you haven't heard?" he said. "Didn't they brief you at all before you left?"

I shook my head. "Sorry. Haven't heard."

He let out a low whistle. "Well, alright. Let's see what I can tell you. And this stuff's not classified or anything. Just what I've been hearing on the open net. You're at least hooked in the net, aren't you? I know you've got implants of some sort, anyway."

"Yeah, I suppose I am," I said. They'd enabled our implants to connect to the network during the last couple years of our training, and taught us how to use it, but I'd been in such a half-dream state during that period that everything I learned was only at an instinctual level, and some of what I learned I didn't even realize I'd learned. I knew a million ways to use the net, but I hadn't even really thought about it on a conscious level yet.

Tuomas said, "Well, you can get a lot of information from there, just take anything you read with a grain of salt, even from the major news networks. The gov's trying to keep the panic down and put a lid on too much gossip, but the only result is even more gossip and less accurate gossip at that."

I poked around at the news networks a bit, and had to raise an eyebrow at some of the things I read. "Demons?" I said.

"Yeah, would you believe that tripe?" Tuomas said. "The first real aliens we meet in space, and people immediately think they're evil demons out to devour our souls or some such. Anyway, yeah, that's what all the hubbub is about."

"They're sending me off to deal with space demons?" I said flatly.

"Apparently so," he said with a smirk. "Fun, huh? Want some cake in a tube?"

"No thanks."

* * *

**Part 6: Falling Off the Edge of the World.**

Although Tuomas and Skadi were nice enough people, I was more than glad when we arrived at Corialis Station and could be back in real fake gravity again. That was where I first met General Maddox.

The general was massive, more of a tank than a man. I don't know whether there was even any meat still underneath the shell of powerful metal. For all my own training, I thought he could as easily reach out and crush my skull with two fingers if he so desired. Whoever designed his eyes had managed to get them just perfect to constantly display a look of contempt at everything he looked at. I stood at attention and saluted him.

He looked me over as if he were examining an insect. "So you're the flimsy little girl Arachne sent me. You'd better be as good as she claims you are."

"I hope so, sir," I said. "What are my orders, sir?"

"You'll report to Farrell," Maddox replied. "He's the contact for your division aboard this station. He'll brief you and give you your orders. I just wanted to see the pathetic runt that Arachne's been extolling lately. I'm not impressed."

He turned and stalked off. I have to admit that being insulted by military types brought back a bit of nostalgia for me. I think I would have been more worried had I met a military person in a position of any rank or authority over me that _wasn't_ insulting me.

I found Farrell in an office, reclining in a chair and looking half asleep. He was a nondescript man wearing a suit rather than the uniform of our division, and at first I had to wonder if I hadn't gotten the wrong room or misheard the name. But he looked over to me after a moment and opened his eyes as if he had been expecting me.

"Ah, Shadowcrawler," he said. "You're finally here. You're late."

"Sorry, sir," I began, but he waved his hand.

"Never mind that," he said. "I'm Winston Farrell, but you may call me Chameleon."

"Chameleon?" I repeated.

He grinned. "If you'd seen me in a crowd, you wouldn't have looked at me twice, would you?"

I said, "The walking tank who met me in the docking area said that you'd brief me and give me my orders."

"Ah, General Maddox met you when you arrived? I wonder what interest he has in our division?"

"He's a general?" I asked.

He nodded. " _The_ general, I should say. He's the top of the military division, and the commanding officer of this station. This war is his show, really."

"I see," I said.

"Anyway. Your briefing. Last year, a remote exploratory team came across a momentous discovery... the first potentially sentient alien species that we humans have come across thus far! They have been observed to use high technology of a sort that we are unfamiliar with, tools, spacefaring vessels."

"I get the impression that there wasn't exactly a peaceful first contact," I said.

"In a word, no," he replied. "Our team was captured and taken off for study. The only reason we got so much information as we did about them was because they kept relaying data through their implants. And although the 'Demons', as the more superstitious sorts have dubbed them, make vocalizations, we have as yet been unable to decipher it as any sort of language."

"What happened to the team?" I asked.

He shook his head. "They didn't make it back. The aliens studied them, poked and prodded at them, and kept them in cages like animals. The aliens tried to feed them, but their offerings didn't quite meet up to human dietary requirements. Two members of the team got sick and died within the first week due to the food they were given. The aliens dissected them. The other three survived a fair while longer before eventually succumbing to the improper diet. They got scurvy, for Pete's sake."

I said, "These aliens sound like they had a response to meeting a new species very similar to what humans might have done in the same position."

He nodded. "Unfortunately, precious little good that does us without any way to communicate. The aliens attacked one of our most remote colonies and captured the majority of the colonists. These were civilians this time, admittedly civilians who knew that they were far from home and that the galaxy might not be the safest place for them. Some of them had implants, and they made no attempt to keep their situation quiet. It went to the net, and people panicked. Some called out for extermination of the 'Demons'. They pushed for war. But we don't even know what we're going up against."

"Are they still being held by the aliens?" I asked.

He shook his head. "I don't know. The only ones who had implants are dead by now. Some of them became sick with some sort of infection that turned them violent and incoherent in many cases. So far as I can tell, at least the aliens figured out by now what to feed the humans so as not to kill us sooner or later, not that that's much consolation."

"So what am I supposed to do here?" I wondered. I wasn't sure why they'd brought me in.

"I know this isn't what you've been trained for," he said. "But we need you to help deal with these aliens in ways that the military cannot. Assassination. Sabotage. Gathering intelligence to find their weak points. Because frankly, while the military might be good at what they do, and cover these things to some extent, they're not Class Omega. You were designed to be the best of the best, and Arachne said you were the best in her class, so this is where we need you most right now."

"I wasn't," I replied quietly.

"What?" he said.

"I wasn't the best in the class. That was Casey."

"Acacia?" he said. "Codename Aphid?"

I nodded distantly. It was the first time in years that I had really had a chance to think about her and what had happened. I felt horrible about the entire matter.

"She had potential, yes," he went on. "But Arachne mentioned having found her lacking in other areas, and had her sent off elsewhere."

"Oh," I said. "I see."

"Anyway," he said. "I'm sending via your implants the data that we've gathered on the so-called Demons so far. Take some time to read over it, rest, and get something to eat. You'll probably be sent out within the week. Dismissed."

"Yes, sir," I said, and headed out.

The information given about the Demons was distressingly scarce. So far as the observers could tell, they smelled back and they were disgusting. Both they and their technology, which seemed somehow alive, were constantly excreting nauseating smells and fluids. There was speculation about the nature of the alien biotechnology, but nothing concrete had been learned yet. They hadn't even managed yet to capture a live specimen or a live piece of technology. I had my work cut out for me, and I felt a little over my head.

* * *

**Interlude**

Sixshooter commented, "These aliens don't really sound much like demons to me."

"They weren't, really," Melissa said. "It was just a name given by panicked people who didn't know any better."

"And letting it get out on the net like that? No one was regulating that sort of thing?"

Melissa shook her head. "Not so much, at the time. Later on, something like that would never have happened, but at that point, they didn't have the proliferation of AIs and, well, people who may as well have been AIs, patrolling the place. It was still very primitive, even by its own standards."

"Heh," Sixshooter said. "For all the humanoid aliens in science fiction with rubber foreheads, the worst thing humanity could do is encounter a species too much like itself. They have enough problems getting along with people of the _same_ species."

* * *

**Part 7: What Measure Is a Non-Cute?**

My first mission against the Demons seemed simple enough at first. They had identified a planet where a Demon base was located, and I was assigned to surveillance and intelligence. We weren't to engage the enemy. Just to gather what information we could. But no plan survives contact with the enemy, I thought, and even before we left I was certain that something would go wrong somewhere along the way. Especially considering the idiotic geniuses I was supposed to be babysitting.

There were two of them, a xenobiologist by the name of Vick Adul, and an anthropologist called something horrible involving tongue clicks in his name. I referred to him as Ticky and didn't even bother trying to pronounce what he said his name was.

We were sent off on a small craft to a system a week away. After that period, I was almost looking forward to meeting the Demons just for a respite from listening to those two and their theories and technobabble.

Finally, refreshingly, we arrived in the system and approached the planet carefully from behind the moon. We entered the atmosphere on the far side of the planet from the Demon colony and approached carefully. The Demons, at least, seemed to prefer planets with an oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere of a composition acceptable for humans, but this dismal planet reminded me of the colony on Machimos.

We set down some ways away from the colony and concealed the ship in a shallow cave in the mountains, and headed off on foot. On top of the ridgeline, we set up our surveillance equipment and pointed it toward the colony.

Adul said, "We're going to need to try to capture a live specimen to study it."

Ticky, at least, was content to try to study their building designs and colony layout from a distance for the moment. "Very organic design," he commented. "But they don't seem to be shy about putting pollutants into the atmosphere."

I didn't need him to tell me that. I could see the black plumes rising into the air from here. Even this far out, the air smelled filthy. I said, "Gather what information you can from here first. We'll move in closer after dusk."

Unlike Machimos, at least this planet had large tree-like plant life for concealment, even if it was fungal. A forest of giant mushrooms sprung up underneath the mountains, and the ground in the lowlands was distressingly squishy underneath the massive caps.

"Fascinating," Adul said, stopping to take a sample from the ground.

"I'm sure it is," I said dryly, rolling my eyes. "But unless it's going to kill me or otherwise inconvenience me, you can keep your report for someone who knows what you're talking about. Besides the fact that we're not out here to study mushrooms."

"Technically, they aren't mushrooms--" Adul began, but I cut him off with a sharp gesture to be quiet and peered about.

I could have sworn I had heard something moving nearby. A faint squishing sound as of footsteps moving across the fungal ground covering. But when I listened carefully for it, I heard nothing. I remembered Arachne's lessons, however, and paid attention to every flicker of sight, feeling of movement, whiff of smell. There was something nearby, and I could _smell_ it.

I gestured to the scientists to stay quiet and still, and crept off as silently as I could around one of the giant fungal growths. There was a being there, hiding in curtains of lichen and smaller mushrooms, seeming... afraid.

The alien was vaguely humanoid in shape, although crouched down on all fours at the moment, and I identified it immediately as a Demon from the images I had seen. But it was smaller than the others, perhaps an immature member of their species. Its hide was black and shiny with ichor. Stunted, vestigial wings grew from its back. The smell wasn't too bad at first, but a foul odor arose as I approached and it realized I was there.

I assumed that the horrible stench was some sort of defense mechanism, and brought to bear a stun stick set on low and a net to try to capture it. Down it went, and I worked to untangle it from the lichen to secure it.

"Adul, get over here!" I called. "I've got one!"

The scientists came over to take a look. "Fascinating," Adul said. "It would appear to be one of their young." He went over to examine the alien more closely. "And a female, unless I miss my guess."

"You know," I said. "If I were them, I'd be really pissed at me about now. One of those aliens must be worried that their daughter is missing by now. I didn't hurt her too badly, did I? She'll be alright?"

"I don't know," Adul said. "Stunned, but still appears to be breathing, steady heartbeat."

"Let's get her back to the ship," I said.

Ticky protested, "But I wanted to get a closer look at their colony!"

I went over to gather up the alien and said, "You wanna be a permanent resident? That's fine by me, but I'm sure your superiors would object."

"No," Ticky stuttered. "Let's get back to the ship."

The alien was as slimy as she looked, the moist hide covered in a thin layer of goo. I was careful not to try to hurt her anymore in carrying her, and at least she was small and light. Like a small child. I was worried. I kept my senses alert for any other signs of aliens nearby, but didn't pick up anything by the time we got back up to where we'd left the ship.

Thankfully, she waited until we were safely tucked aboard the ship inside the cave before regaining consciousness. Immediately, she seemed to panic, shrieking loudly, and the cabin was filled with such a horrible stench that the scientists had to pull on breathers. I rolled my eyes. It didn't even especially bother me.

"Relax, little one," I said, trying to sound soothing. "We're not trying to hurt you."

I didn't want to stun her again, and we had no idea how sedation drugs would work on her biology. I couldn't help but think that, no matter what this being looked like, this was still a sentient being, hideous and disgusting as humans might take them to be. I couldn't help but think that these aliens were really a lot like human beings, when it came down to it.

"Would you like some food?" I said, offering her some of the specially prepared paste we had been given before heading out. It had been formulated after the food the aliens had first given the humans, with the assumption that that was the sort of thing they normally expected to eat.

After a few more minutes, the alien female calmed down and stopped screaming and struggling, and the stench faded again. She poked her face over and made a snuffing sort of sound from the line of four nostrils located on each side of her neck, then snatched up the paste and licked it up rapidly.

"There you go, all better now?" I said. I glanced aside at the two scientists and said, "I hope you guys are managing to learn something from this."

Ticky nodded enthusiastically, and pulled off his breather for the moment. "The stinking cloud appears to be a defensive mechanism, much along the lines of such animals as skunks."

"Obviously she's afraid," I said. "She's a _child_."

"We should get her back to Corialis Station," Adul said. "While we've got some decent equipment here, they'll be able to do much more with her there."

"I don't know how well she'll react to microgravity," I said. "And the place we had to secure a specimen was intended for a full-grown alien. I doubt she'll mind having a little more room to move around, though, I suppose."

Carefully, trying not to cause the alien to freak out again, the three of us worked at settling her into her closet for the trip into hyperspace and restraining her. She panicked again at the restraints and refused to cooperate, flailing about and stinking and shrieking. Finally I got her secured in for takeoff, and headed off to the cockpit to get out of here.

We strapped in, and I powered up the engines and brought us out of the cave slow and close to the ground, trying to avoid detection until we were in the clear. Once far from the colony, I brought the ship up into space.

"What's that light?" Ticky said, pointing frantically.

"Shut up," I snapped.

There was a ship, massive and black, moving to intercept us. I knew it was too slow to do so itself, but I hoped that it didn't have any particularly accurate weapons that could be used at this range. Then a burst of static came over my implants, almost disorienting me for a moment. I stayed focused, and set my implants to filter it out and analyze whatever it was. The signal faded in and out, and I thought that they might be trying to get a message through to us somehow, but I had no way to reply.

For the sake of our passenger, I didn't want to push acceleration any faster than a little over one G, as I wasn't sure what sort of pressure the aliens could stand up to. For that matter, I didn't want to turn the scientists into paste either. Well, I did, but I didn't care to be chewed out by Maddox or Chameleon for it.

It was tense for a long moment as we climbed out of the atmosphere agonizingly slowly, but the alien vessel didn't try to fire upon us. It was a relief when the ship's instruments declared the particle density low enough to safely enter hyperspace, and we went through.

"You two stay here," I told Adul and Ticky. "I'm going to go back and see if our passenger is alright."

I went back to the alien's compartment and removed her restraints.

"There you go," I said. "Better now?"

The smell was a little different now. She floated about the compartment, bouncing lightly from one wall to the next. She was just a child, I thought, and a very confused one at that. I didn't even know what normal human kids were like, but I knew how insatiably curious I was when I was young.

I left her for Ticky and Adul to study, but I made sure to be present anytime that I could, ostensibly to protect them from her. Mainly, however, I wanted to make sure that _they_ didn't hurt _her_ , or freak her out again, if at all possible. Hell, even from a command standpoint, she was more important than them at this point.

A week later, we arrived back at Corialis Station. We brought out the alien girl carefully, whom I had nicknamed Daisy along the way. People in labcoats and uniforms crowded around her, all trying to get a close look at her, and she immediately sent up the stink bomb and forced them away.

"Hey," I said, raising my hands. "Give her some space. She's just scared."

The crowd reluctantly backed off a bit, although more from the stink than anything else. One of the scientists said, "We need to get it to the lab and run some tests on it."

A couple of them put on breathers and went to shuffle her off. I sighed inwardly. It was out of my hands now, and I had a report to make. I hoped that Daisy would be alright.

* * *

**Part 8: And Now For Some Gratuitous Shooting and Explosions.**

My next mission against the Demons was more my style, and also didn't involve having to babysit anyone else. A solo mission, to kill and destroy. This was something I was much more comfortable with. And my first solo mission, at that. I was outright excited at the prospect.

I was sent to a nearby base that had recently been overrun by Demons. Arachne had arrived on the station, and I had the privelege of listening to her argue with Maddox about it.

Maddox said, "Nuke the place from orbit. Wipe out every last one of the scum."

Arachne shook her head. "There might still be survivors, and that won't help us gain any sort of information about their technology. Besides, dare I remind you that your division has been consistantly lacking in their confrontations with the enemy?"

"Oh, and what would _you_ suggest instead?" Maddox said. He looked at her in such a way that I had to wonder if he was about to squish her like a bug. But then, he looked at everyone that way.

"Let's send Shadowcrawler in to infiltrate the place," Arachne suggested.

Maddox just snorted. "You have a lot of faith in your star pupil. But fine. She did well enough on the last mission. But if she can't get the job done, we're nuking the place from orbit, and you're not going to say a word against it, you hear me?"

Neither of them seemed to particularly care that I was still in the room at the time, quietly standing off to the side and being overall unobtrusive. Arachne, however, gestured me over at this.

"We'll get you a ship squared away in no time," Arachne said. "Let's see if you can do what the military has thus far been unable to. Secure us a victory."

I could practically smoke fuming out of Maddox's head, but he didn't say a word against Arachne. Instead, he just turned and stalked out. I could only imagine that somewhere, there might have been a bulwark screaming in pain after that.

"So," Arachne said with a quirk of a grin. "Think you can do it, or are you going to embarrass me in front of Maddox?"

"I can do it," I assured her.

Arachne laughed. "No pressure or anything." She patted me on the shoulder.

I smirked.

I was given access to everything I thought I might need for the mission, but I really wasn't worried. I was excited for a chance to be out and do what I'd been trained to do. It wasn't even that I was determined to prove myself or anything. I never really thought I had anything to prove. I just had a job to do, and I was damned well going to do it, and do it right.

My ship was large enough to carry several passengers, presumably on the offchance that I came across any survivors, but they weren't hopeful. There weren't any implant signals coming in from the people who had been there, so they were assumed to all have been killed. I set off to the system in question. It was only five days distant from Corialis, far too close for comfort. The military had a small fleet defending the Corialis system as it was.

Solberg was the name of the planet. It was a beautiful, terrestrial place that they were probably intending on seriously colonizing at some point, if it hadn't been for the alien invasion. The sun was bright, the plants were green, the oceans were orange... well, can't have everything, I suppose.

The only real blemish was the black spot that had been the human base. The aliens had moved in and taken over the place, and it was as though a cloud of black filth and sludge and choking clouds had covered the immediate area around the base. Funny how they again managed to remind me of humans in that way.

I came in quietly, trying to avoid detection, but at least I didn't have to worry about babysitting this time. I came in close to the base without being detected and landed in the forest nearby, tucking away my ship in a densely foliated valley. Thanks to the forest, I had managed to come in very close, and I didn't think anyone had detected me on the way in. I'd wanted to get in close so that I could make a quick getaway if necessary.

Quietly and cautiously, I headed toward the base. It was still recognizable as having originally been a human base, but it had changed. The aliens had come in and taken over everything. The walls were slick with black fluid, and strange growths could be seen along many of the buildings. This wasn't a place that humans were going to be reclaiming easily, if at all. But my mission wasn't reclamation. It was to destroy the place and get our technology out of alien hands.

I snuck in under cover of darkness. As I did so, I noticed that static I'd heard before, filling my implants. It was impossible to get a message in or out of the place with that sort of thing going on. I set my implants to try to filter it out and cut through it, but I wasn't too worried about contacting headquarters just at the moment. But it wasn't a good sign nonetheless.

As I crept through the base, I realized that the aliens were very active at the moment. None of them seemed to notice me, but it occurred to me that they might be nocturnal. I quietly cursed myself, not for the first time and certainly not the last, for making assumptions about the unknown without having stopped to think about it. I was projecting too much of humanity on them where it wasn't appropriate.

I went and headed right back out of the colony again and decided to wait for the cover of daylight instead. I observed them from a safe distance as the sun came up, and noticed my guess appeared to be correct. They were heading inside as the sun was coming up.

Back into the base I went. I noticed that in the sunlight, the moist film that covered everything was slowly drying out. Perhaps a reason why they didn't like the sun overly much.

Inside one of the buildings, I came almost face to face with one of the aliens. I could swear that he looked right at me. But he just turned and continued on as if he didn't even see me. I had to wonder to myself if these aliens just had very poor eyesight, or what.

Then I realized that the answer might be simpler than that. I saw humans running around, carrying things, not many of them. I frowned, and wondered, had the aliens enslaved the workers at the base? They were filthy and emaciated, clothes torn, and they had some cuts and bruises on their skin. When they saw me, I couldn't be certain if their expression was panic or relief.

One of them said to me in a hushed voice, "Are you here to rescue us?"

"I didn't expect to find survivors," I said. "What are you doing here? They don't have you locked up?"

"They don't treat us too badly if we obey," he said. "But it's hard for them to convey what they want us to do. Can you come along with me so they don't get suspicious? I can tell you all about it."

I went along with him as he moved supply crates from one place to another. I had to wonder why these soldiers were aiding the enemy like this. Why they'd given in so easily. But I kept my thoughts to myself on the matter for the moment and listened to the man, Calvert was his name, as he told me what was going on.

When the base had been taken over, many of the humans stationed here had been killed, but the aliens had taken the survivors prisoner and beaten some of them into submission. They tried to train them to do menial tasks, the most that they could convey with growls and gestures, and Calvert and two of his buddies went along with it. Pathetic, I thought.

"If we do what they want, we get fed better and don't get beaten," Calvert said. "I'm sure you understand."

"Perfectly," I said lightly. "Where are the others that are still being held? How many of them are there?"

"Five others," he said, and described where they were being held.

I thanked him and headed off to find them. I found the room Calvert had described, but the door was sealed, not by human locking mechanisms, but by some sort of growth that had been placed over the door, holding it in place. A sticky black ooze covered much of the walls and door. I pulled out a knife and tried to slice through the living lock. It was hard as bone and firmly attached to the metal, but I was able to pry it loose from one end. It had tried to burrow itself into the metal, but hadn't had as much to work with on the door side.

The five of them were inside what appeared to have been their own barracks before the aliens came. They looked even more worse for wear than Calvert had. At least he might have showered recently. These people were battered and bruised, their clothing caked with blood and ichor, and half-starved. Their eyes lit up with hope when they saw me.

"We're saved!" they said. "Someone's here to rescue us!"

"Can you travel?" I asked. "Some of you don't look very well off."

"We're not, but we'll damned well do our best to not slow you down." Their apparent leader was an Asian-looking man who might have been in his forties. He introduced himself as Captain Chan. "Franklin's the worst off. He's sick, and been getting worse every day."

"Get ready to go," I said. "Make whatever preparations you need to. Tell me, is anyone else being held here? And was anyone else aiding the Demons besides Calvert and the other two I saw?"

"No," Chan said. "We refused to give in like that. We're soldiers, not snivelling dogs. Calvert is a traitor."

I gave a short nod, and led them out of the barracks. The sun was well up and the hallways were quiet for the moment. "Stay close," I said. "And keep an eye out. I need to blow this place. Is the main reactor still online?"

"I think so," Chan said. "The lights were still on and I could hear it humming in the distance."

"Good," I said.

I led the way to the reactor room. Franklin groaned, and I glanced briefly at him. He didn't look too good. There were black lesions on his skin, and his eyes were filmy. I didn't think he would make it back to headquarters like that.

The door to the reactor room was also sealed with one of the biotech locks. I growled quietly and tried to work it loose, but it took me a few tense minutes. The walls shuddered a little as I pulled it loose.

There was a Demon inside the reactor room. It spun around and made a shrieking noise, and emitted a foul stench. It pulled out a tube and shot a glob of sticky goo at me.

I darted out of the way, and pulled out my gun and shot at it in one motion. I had to be careful what angle I aimed with. It wouldn't have been good to inadvertently make the place blow before we were well away from there.

The alien screamed and let out an even more unpleasant smell. It stumbled over to a wall and slumped down, oozing ichor. I shot it a couple more times to be sure it wouldn't get up again.

I said to Chan, "Come help me with this. We may not have much time."

We went over to the equipment and wiped off some of the slime that seemed to cover everything. Thankfully, they hadn't done much to interfere with the reactor yet. Carefully, we set it up so that it would blow in twenty minutes, giving us hopefully enough time to get to the ship and well enough away to avoid the blast.

"That's it," I said. "Let's go!" I headed for the door.

I led them in the direction of where I'd left the ship. Franklin was stumbling and falling behind. He couldn't keep up. Finally he fell to the ground twitching and vomiting. One of the soldiers crouched by his side and tried to help him.

"Leave him," I said.

I continued on, not pausing or even bothering to glance back to see if the soldier had followed my order. We were getting close to the base perimeter when I caught a whiff of Demons converging on our location.

"Watch out," I said. I fired a few bullets at the cluster of aliens the moment I saw them.

Their shrieking and stench told me I'd found at least one mark. They fired back, not with globs of goo this time, but with hardened projectiles. They couldn't hit me, but one of the soldiers with me wasn't quick enough to duck for cover. He yelled and went down, clutching his abdomon.

A few more bullets later and the Demons stopped shooting at us. I looked over and assessed the damage. One of the other soldiers had been nicked in the arm by one of the projectiles -- thorns, they looked like. It wasn't bad, though. The man with the gut wound, however, I didn't have high hopes for.

"Go on," he gasped. "Get out of here. I won't make it."

I nodded shortly to him. "Let's go," I said to the others.

As we reached the base perimeter, Calvert came running up to us. "Get me out of here!" he said. "Don't leave me here!"

I glanced aside to him and didn't stop. "Give me one good reason why I should waste one second on you," I said.

"Please have mercy!" he said. "You have to understand. They were torturing us!"

I turned to him in disgust and said, "You are not worth the oxygen to take you back to headquarters. You want mercy? Here then."

I whipped out my gun and shot him right in the forehead. He was still staring at me with a look of shock as he dropped to the ground.

"Let's go," I said, tucking the gun away and opening up the ship.

The three surviving soldiers didn't even say a word as they climbed aboard after me. Once everyone was aboard and the hatch sealed, I took off and headed up away from the base, not even particularly trying to be subtle about it now. They knew I was here. Now I just had to get away.

An explosion ripped through the atmosphere behind me. I glanced at the sensors to assure myself that the base had been annihilated in the blast. They wouldn't find anything to salvage and study here. Satisfied that the mission was a success, I eased the ship out of the atmosphere and into hyperspace.

* * *

**Part 9: How to Tell Your Superiors Are Sadists.**

I was commended for my success in the Solberg system. I was given more missions, although rarely did I have as clear an idea just what I was doing or why as on Solberg. Sometimes Arachne herself was present, while at other times I worked through Chameleon instead.

And then Tharpie showed up, and Arachne said the dreaded words, "The two of you will be working together on this next mission."

My heart sank. I had to wonder to myself just what I had done to be punished in such a manner.

"You'll find specific orders for each of you in your implants," Arachne said. "You are to infiltrate a Demon space station, located at these coordinates, in the Diolkos system."

It sounded risky. All the more risky for having to be saddled with Tharpie for the assignment. I started to have some serious doubts about just what Arachne was trying to do here, but I kept quiet. I'd carry out my mission regardless, whether or not Tharpie was actually any help with it.

I went over the mission details that Arachne had sent me. It was even more risky than I had first thought. Destroying the station would do the job, but failing that, there was one specific alien who needed to be killed above all else. I don't know how they managed to figure out that he was any sort of authority figure or scientist or anything else. They didn't bother mentioning that bit. I have no idea why Tharpie was supposed to be along. I was also given a sample of specially formulated poison that the scientists believed would work on Demons.

We went to our ship, and headed out. Two weeks, alone in a small ship with _her_. And even then she wasn't exactly the most stable of types. She thought she was some sort of great hero, and somewhere along the way she had acquired custom-made sonic weaponry.

"Isn't this great?" she said, and hummed, causing the blade to vibrate.

I just took one look at it and said, "Put that thing away."

"But it's the latest! The cutting edge of technology!" she said.

"And don't sing at me, Banshee," I retorted.

She didn't even have the good graces to keep quiet or keep to herself throughout the trip. I had to absently wonder to myself if I wasn't intended to kill her or let her have some horrible accident and not bring her back, or something. But alas, that wasn't to be the case.

Mercifully, we finally arrived in the Diolkos system. We dropped out of hyperspace and approached, running quiet to try to avoid detection. I needn't have worried too much about it, though. For all the lack of any sort of real cloaking device or the like, their sensors were as nearsighted as they were.

The Demon station was pitch black against the background of the gas giant it orbited. They didn't have any windows. However, it was roughly cylindrical and rotated along its axis, so I assumed they used similar methods as the humans to generate gravity. After peering over it for a decent place to try to board, I brought the ship in toward a nook near one end of the station. Before we even reached the station, my implants were filled with static, preventing me from connecting to the network. They still hadn't found a way to get through it. I attached the ship's boarding clamps to the station, and we pulled on spacesuits and headed outside.

After feeling about a bit, we came across what might have passed for an airlock, and managed to convince it to open with some prodding. Even their architecture seemed alive in some way, a smooth black carapace. After we got inside, the carapace airlock smoothly closed shut on its own. I glanced back at it, but I was more nervous about being trapped in here with Tharpie than I was about being trapped in here at all.

The airlock pressurized, apparently automatically, and after a few minutes the inner doors opened. We headed inside. The interior was black and grim, full of slime and ichor on every surface. At least the place had breathable air and an atmospheric pressure similar to Earth standard, so we pulled off our helmets and activated infrared sensor implants to try to get some idea what the interior of the station was like.

The walls were cool, but not the cool of space or even of metal. They seemed in some way alive, and a heavy, musky odor filled the air. This sort of biotechnology was on a wholly alien level to anything I'd seen before. But the blackness inside was enough to cement what I had already guessed at before. Their eyesight may or may not be entirely non-existent, but they relied on it so little as to consider it entirely non-essential.

We had hardly gone far down the first corridor before Tharpie slipped in the ooze and fell, sliding and rolling across the ground and thoroughly covering herself in the goo.

"Banshee, you are pathetic," I murmured softly, snorting disdainfully. "What kind of a worthless excuse for an Omega _are_ you to not even have the least bit of dexterity?"

"Silence yourself, Shadowcrawler," she replied, climbing to her feet again. "Did you know that Arachne considers you expendable in this mission?"

I rolled my eyes. "Don't even give me that."

She said, "I'm the one with the important mission here."

"Yeah, well, good luck with that," I said.

I wondered absently just how I was going to find my target, never mind identify him. As we went along the corridor, I detected an alien approaching, and halted, glancing about. There wasn't anywhere to take cover, however, and the patroller was quickly upon us.

It looked straight at me with a shriek and a bad scent, and moved to attack. It shot out several globs of goo toward me, but I dodged out of the way. Still it bore down on me as I shot at it repeatedly. Before it went down, it ripped my suit half to shreds and gave me several deep, nasty cuts. It had entirely ignored Tharpie.

"Banshee, what the hell were you doing there just now?" I said.

"Staying out of the way," Tharpie said.

I said, "I could have been killed!"

"Not my problem," she said.

I was sorely tempted to just shoot her now and be done with it, and claim that the aliens had, unfortunately, taken her down. I had to wonder why they even kept her on when she was so obviously not mentally stable. But obviously, that wasn't what they were looking for, apparently.

"I'm so going to get you court-martialed, Tharpie," I hissed at her.

I performed some quick first aid on my cuts and continued on, keeping close to one of the walls, and running my fingers lightly along its slimy surface. As I did so, an aperture slid open in the wall, leading into a side room. I ducked inside and took a moment to rest.

I wondered why the alien had gone straight for me and ignored Tharpie. Then I realized that she was covered in that sticky slime that was all over everything. It must have just mistaken her for part of the furniture or the like. Hmming thoughtfully to myself, I went over to one of the walls in the room and rolled along it, thoroughly smearing black ichor all over what was left of my suit.

Tharpie said, "Shadowcrawler, are you feeling alright?"

I didn't deign to answer her. I had been feeling a little light-headed even before smearing on my camouflage, but now it was getting worse. I feared that whatever nasty black ichor the aliens excreted was seeping into the cuts on my body and infecting me. I remembered what had happened to Franklin back on planet Solberg.

Shaking my head out in futile hopes of clearing it, I stalked out of the room again, ignoring Tharpie. She followed me down the corridors as I blindly tried to figure out where my target might be, or at the very least, some sort of reactor or weapons system or anything that I might be able to use to just destroy the station and make it a moot point.

Thankfully, my slimy disguise, if nothing else, made me all but invisible to the aliens. After wandering around for an unknown amount of time, I came to a catwalk overlooking an area with actual light. There were several Demons gathered around a glowing pillar of crystal-clear light. After the pitch blackness of the corridors, I blinked for a moment as my eyes adjusted.

I didn't know what it was or what it was for. But I recognized one of the Demons from the mission imagery I had been given. My target. The markings matched up exactly to what I had been given, so far as I could tell. If I were to simply open fire now, I would attract the attention of the other half dozen Demons in the room, however. I only then noticed that Tharpie had wandered off at some point, and was grateful. Increased chance of success for my mission without her idiocy.

I tried to focus on the task at hand, but it was difficult. I was dizzy and very nearly fell off the catwalk. I vaguely remembered the poison that I had been given. Moving more instinctively than anything else, I applied the poison to a dart and shot it quietly across the intervening space, where it planted itself neatly in my target's back.

A nasty smell wafted up from below, and the Demons began poking about in confusion. Time to make good my escape. I had to get back to the ship, and I relied on my implants to remember the passageways back there. My suit was compromised, but my helmet was still intact, so while there may be additional damage at least I wouldn't suffocate. If Tharpie were feeling like not being an idiot, I could get her to move the ship around closer to the airlock. But I didn't really care to rely on her for anything.

I came upon her again in the corridor near the airlock. "Banshee," I said. "There you are."

"Get away from me," Tharpie said. "You're infected."

"Tharpie, bring around the ship to the airlock," I said.

"No way," Tharpie said. "You're turning into one of them! They've corrupted you. You're becoming an evil, tainted thing, just like them! You're not going to get me, too!"

I growled. "Tharpie, you're insane, unreliable, and an outright liability. Give me one good reason why I shouldn't just kill you now and claim the Demons got you?"

"Go ahead and try, monster!" Tharpie said. "You won't catch me!"

I pulled out my gun and fired at her, but my movements were sluggish and my mind was clouded, and Tharpie was still in top shape. My implants were desparately trying to compensate, but it wasn't good enough. They were barely managing to make me retain consciousness.

Tharpie hummed a note loudly and fired back. Something painful and vibrating lodged itself in my shoulder. I stumbled backwards, reaching out for something, but found only slick walls. I hit the ground.

"Tharpie," I cried out. "I will kill you. I will kill you!"

But she was already gone. Sloppy of her, I thought, but I had to be grateful for her sloppiness. I crawled off, and found a door leading into a quiet side room nearby. I slumped into the corner and tried to tend to my wounds, carefully removing the bullet and setting my implants into a healing cycle in hopes of repairing some of the damage and warding off the infection. I fell into a deep sleep.

* * *

**Interlude**

"Wow, your government put up with this sort of crap?" Sixshooter said.

Melissa shrugged. "I have no idea what they were thinking. I'm sure they thought they could use her somehow, but by this point I was wondering if for some reason they were _trying_ to get me killed."

"So, this Tharpie chick, did you kill her?" Sixshooter asked.

Melissa chuckled. "Not yet. But it wasn't the last time we'd meet, to be sure. I'll get to that in a bit."

* * *

**Part 10: In Space, No One Can Smell Your Stink.**

I came to slowly, and my head was clear. There was light, and I blinked. Actual light, and not just my optical implants trying to pick up any wavelengths they could find. I was laying on my back on a cold table, and I realized I was naked and clean.

I sat upright, and an alien approached me, emitting a gentle, soothing fragrance. It finally dawned on me just then that they were communicating by _smell_. We had spent all this time trying to analyze their vocalizations for meaning, and I had to wonder to myself whether they had been trying to analyze the humans' farts for meaning. I had no way to communicate with them back myself, but I could certainly try to figure out what they were saying. I set my implants on a detailed analysis of all the scents I had encountered in the presence of the aliens.

At least my injuries had been patched up and were on the way to healing. My shoulder was still sore, though. Still have a mark from it. See? Right here.

The alien was gesturing at me. They didn't seem to be hugely visually oriented, but I guessed that they used a form of sign language to try to communicate with the olfactorily-impaired. I gestured back, trying to mimic his movements. It was the first time I had thought to look close enough to realize that they had four fingers and a thumb, just like humans. This particular alien, I later came to think of as Mimir, or just Mim.

He let out a heavy, pleasant smell for a moment, like too much perfume. I guessed that meant he was pleased. Mimir turned around and pulled something out of a compartment, and emitted another scent that I could swear smelled like chocolate. The container he pulled out held something that vaguely resembled food, and he made gestures pointing from the bowl to his mouth as if to display that it was meant to be eaten.

The bowl contained little black pebbles, like berries, that were soft and squishy. I experimentally picked up one, gingerly feeling it, and put it in my mouth. It tasted strange, but my implants didn't detect anything harmful to human biology in them. They were very nutritious, and in fact were considerably better than space rations.

"Thank you," I said, eating another one thoughtfully.

I didn't think that they were likely even capable of vocalizing words like the human mouth and tongue, for all that they shrieked and screamed when they were in distress. But I had to wonder, if this alien were any sort of scientist or the like, if I could get across the idea that we communicated by sounds. That I could make myself understood somehow.

I set the bowl on the table and picked out one of the berries, and held it up between my fingers. "Food," I said, very clearly and deliberately. "Food."

Mimir looked at me strangely, cocking his head one way and the other and letting out a faint spicy fragrance. Could that mean curiosity, or confusion, I wondered?

I set the berry back into the bowl and gestured to myself, and said, "Human. Human."

The scent changed again, a dizzying array of mixed odors coming more quickly than I could identify them. Mim spun around again, poking at a bit of biotech. I'm not sure what he was doing. But he seemed excited. He then turned around again, and then gestured at himself in the same way I had done, and emitted a distinctive musky scent.

"Demon," I said. "Demon. Demon." I didn't care to argue the term at the moment. There might be other aliens out there, and this was the name that had been applied to their species, for better or worse.

He pointed at me, and let out a softer fragrance, though still very clear and distinct, vaguely resembling roasted chicken.

"Human," I said, pointing to myself. "Human."

Mimir then let out the chocolate smell again, but didn't point, just cocking his head back and forth a couple times as if in question.

I reached over and picked up one of the berries. "Food?" I asked.

He lifted his hands to the ceiling and let out a sweet smell, chirping and jumping up and down in what I assumed was excitement. I don't know if he made any connection to what I was saying or not yet, but something had been communicated between us. I had to wonder if anyone else had even managed this much yet, or if anyone in such a position had been too busy trying to shoot at the other side to this point.

Mimir tested me on those three words a couple times, as if to make sure that it wasn't just a fluke. Then he rushed for the door and scrambled out of the room. I stared at the door for a few moments as it slid shut again, but decided not to try anything at the moment. I popped another berry in my mouth and waited for him to return. I wasn't being held a prisoner or anything, and whether or not his people were at war with mine, he had brought me somewhere safe, cleaned me up, tended to my wounds, and given me food. I wasn't even entirely certain if I was still on the station or not.

A few minutes later, Mim came back into the room with another one of his kind in tow. A complex cloud of scents surrounded them, and the one I had been speaking with before was gesturing about wildly and pointing at me. They settled themselves standing before me, and the scents cleared for a moment before Mim let out the chocolaty smell again.

"Food," I said, picking up a berry from the bowl.

The Demons chirped excitedly, and let out sweet smells. They tested me a couple times on those three words again. Then the second Demon pushed the other one aside. He went over and patted the wall, and made a scent.

"Wall," I said.

He went over to the door and opened it, gestured at it, making another scent.

"Door," I said.

He came over to the table I was sitting on and patted it, emitting a third scent.

"Table," I said.

Then he went back to stand before me again, put his hands together, and made the same scent he had made for the door.

"Door," I said, pointing to the door.

The two of them waved their hands above their heads and jumped in unison, chirping delightedly and emitting another complex series of scents that I had no hope of following. I could only be grateful to my implants to help me identify and analyze all the smells they used, but I still had a long way to go before I might have any chance of holding an actual conversation with one of the aliens.

After a bit more testing, the two of them went off and left me alone in the room again. This time I got up and poked around a bit. I couldn't make any sense of their equipment. Especially considering that things seemed to be labeled in smell. The drawer where the berries had come from seemed to be labeled in the chocolate sort of scent I had identified with food, and it opened at a press in the right spot, so I went and put the bowl back inside.

I went over toward the door. Upon a touch, it slid open with a soft whoosh. The hallway outside was dark and empty. I wondered just where I was, whether I was still on the station or somewhere else, and also where they might have put my equipment.

Curiously, I sniffed about the various drawers, smelling their labels and seeing what was inside each of them. Surgical tools. Vials, empty and filled. Rags. Things were a little different than humans might have used, but I could guess as their function. I found one drawer labeled with the scent for 'human', and inside it my clothing and equipment had been tucked away. My clothes were soiled and ruined, torn and soaked with ichor, and without those I didn't really have a place to carry my other equipment. But it was reassuring to know where it was, nonetheless. I left it be for the moment.

Over the next few days, judging time solely by my implants, several Demons came in and out of the room, each trying to test or expand on my vocabulary. I had yet to succeed in getting them to understand my attempts at verbal communication. I was hungry, and tried asking for food once.

"Food?" I said. "Food? Food?"

Mim made no sign of understanding, cocking his head back and forth and looking at me.

I made gestures as if eating, and repeated, "Food?" Finally I went straight over to the drawer where the berries were kept and opened it, and said, "Food!" I held out the bowl and ate one, and said, "Food, food, food!"

I might as well have been a monkey ooking away madly for all the alien seemed to comprehend me. I had to find some way to communicate with them. I reasoned, if humans had devices to record and reproduce sounds and images, these aliens might have similar ones to reproduce smells. If I could get my hands on one, I might be able to get some sort of basic understanding across to them.

However, such was not to be forthcoming during the next couple weeks there. I wasn't being held a prisoner. I poked around in the corridors outside the lab, and although I got whiffs of curious scents, no one shot at me or roughly dragged me back. So I took the opportunity to try to learn what I could.

At one point, Mim came to the lab and opened the drawer where my things were being kept. He pulled out the darts and the poison and examined them, and transfered the remainder of the poison into one of his own vials. I think he was trying to tell me something, but I couldn't decipher what it was. He shoved the darts away into a different compartment in the walls rather than back into one of the drawers, however. When I looked later at where he'd put them, I saw it was a chute of some sort leading down into blackness. A disposal chute of some sort? Why would he do that? Was he trying to destroy the evidence of my attack on the alien I'd been assigned to kill?

* * *

**Part 11: Freedom Smells Kind of Like Mint.**

Regardless, I had been there for about two weeks when Mim came in, smelling a bit worried. There was some urgency to his movements and scents. Hastily, he pulled out my belongings from the drawer and gathered them up, handed them to me, and directed me to follow and led me down the corridors to an airlock, and we climbed aboard a small ship. He strapped me in, emitting soothing scents, and took the ship off away from the station and into hyperspace.

Presumably for my benefit, he kept an actual light on in the cockpit as we travelled. It had been a while since I'd eaten, and I didn't know where he put the space berries, so I said, "Food?"

He looked at me, cocked his head back and forth. I really hoped that I could get across to him somehow.

"Food," I said. I gestured to my mouth, made chewing movements. "Food. Food?"

He made the chocolaty scent.

I beamed in delight, and nodded eagerly. "Yes! Food!"

Mim reached over and pulled out a jar of the berries, and handed it to me. I carefully pulled out one and ate it hungrily. I was delighted. Either the words or the gestures, whichever, but I had gotten something across to him finally.

As we settled in for the trip, Mim relaxed and put on a scent emitter device to "play" gentle, soothing smells of fresh flowers and meadows. I practically beamed again when I realized what it was. I had thought that they must have something like that! I unstrapped myself and went over to it, and poked at it a bit.

Mim let out a curious scent, as if wondering what I was doing, but he didn't move to stop me or interfere.

"Speak?" I said, gesturing between myself and the alien. "Smell?"

I fiddled with the device, trying to figure out how to make it emit different smells, which was obnoxious in part due to the lack of any sort of labeling or clear buttons. I had to wonder just what sort of sense they had on their fingers. Did they have noses on their hands too, I wondered?

It took me quite some while fumbling around with the device to figure out how to make it do what I wanted it to, and the Demon was not especially helpful in that regard. We still didn't have exactly enough of a working vocabulary for him to actually try to really explain anything to me, unfortunately. We spent another two weeks in transit, however, so I had plenty of time to experiment.

Finally, we arrived at our destination. I was still no wiser as to where we were going or why the entire trip. Mim brought us down to land at a desolate moon base in an inhospitable system. The place was entirely built underground, and the gravity was lighter than I was used to. We climbed out of the ship to meet a handful of other aliens, who exchanged scent-greetings that seemed slightly hurried and a little worried.

Mim started to explain to them what was going on, and I tried to follow it as best as I could. There was something about danger, that much I could tell, and he was worried about something, obviously. But he seemed to be worried about other Demons, and not the humans. He gestured at me also, as if introducing me, and seemed to have high praise to lavish on me, so far as I could tell anyway. I had to wonder whether I was more of a guinea pig of an ambassador at this point.

Unfortunately, even here, my implants still couldn't contact the network. By this point, I was starting to think that they had become damaged at some point along the way, and not that there was any sort of interference. I'd need to get back to headquarters to get them checked out and probably repaired. I would dearly have loved to be able to notify them sooner that I was alright and just what exactly Tharpie had done.

They treated me well enough, however. They all seemed very curious and fascinated with me. They provided me with food and my own quarters, and a hand-held scent device for me to try to communicate with them. They never did seem to make the connection between sounds and language, though. Although my olfactory organs weren't nearly as refined as theirs, after the first couple months there I was able to hold simple conversations with them.

As we moved into being able to communicate more abstract concepts, I started to understand just what was going on, who they were, and why they were here. So far as I could figure out, this group of aliens were the equivalent of scientists, who wanted to study and learn rather than conquer and enslave. The alien species was very much divided on the matter, and apparently I had killed one of the biggest warmongerers that they had. He had been some sort of general or military leader figure or another.

I tried to explain to them that the humans had just been defending themselves, that we didn't want to wipe them out, and would be happy to grow to understand them and live peacefully with them. There didn't need to be war, I thought. We weren't so very different, after all. I had to wonder where in my black ops training I had picked up the idealistic streak. Probably from Mr. Ian Woon.

The aliens made me some new clothes. Perhaps not the best fit, and they itched a little, but they'd done a pretty good job of it considering they didn't tend to use cloth for wearing themselves. They even let me keep my weapons. I wasn't a prisoner here, but a guest.

They introduced me to their own art while I was there. I couldn't fully appreciate it, but the gentle, sweet smells that passed for their sort of "poetry" were appealing in their own way. These generally seemed to have themes of flowers, rainfall, forests, or food.

I tried to explain to them that I needed to contact my own people somehow. With my network connection dead, that would mean actually going to some human base or colony, and using their transmitters. That would, of course, require approaching carefully without getting shot down in the process. It was a risky prospect, to be sure, but I couldn't stay here forever. I'd been here for too long as it was, just trying to communicate with them.

The aliens were reluctant to approach a human colony. What with the war going on, quite understandably, they didn't want to give the wrong impression and get killed themselves. And from the sounds of things, the humans had managed to score a couple more victories in the meantime.

Mim approached me. He was willing to help me, he expressed. He wanted a better chance to study the humans and learn more about us. He knew it would be risky, that he would possibly be killed. But sometimes risks had to be taken. I was guessing and inferring a lot trying to decipher their communication, but I think that was the general gist of it.

Perhaps, I thought, eventually the humans might be able to manage some sort of rapport with the Demons. Perhaps we could build equipment that could better analyze their scent communication, even create a sort of universal translator for it. Perhaps we might not have to fight.

* * *

**Part 12: Smells Like Geriatric Spirit.**

So, after saying farewell to the other aliens at the base, I gathered up my things and boarded Mim's ship. I had already been gone for months by this point, and I was more than a little nervous about being shot down by my own people here. I couldn't even make any suggestions as to a location to try this at, especially without access to the network to call up any star charts. I had to trust Mim to have some intelligence of his own and pick a target wisely.

It took us another week and a half to get to our destination. I spent a lot of time trying to get across what I could to Mim, trying to explain how to not seem threatening to humans, not to put out any harsh smells, and so forth. It was frustrating at times, not being able to express myself clearly, but at least now I could express myself _at all_.

We arrived in the system and approached the planet. It looked to be a desolate, mountainous world. I hoped that we weren't detected, but we got to the atmosphere and made out way in without a hitch. We came in and landed a ways away from the colony. I guessed that it might be some sort of mining colony.

Mim landed the ship at the bottom of a narrow mountain valley, and we climbed out and approached the colony on foot. The oxygen levels of the planet were a little lower than Earth-standard, but within acceptable limits. I moved ahead of Mim, leading the way.

When we reached a rocky outcropping overlooking the colony, I signalled to Mim to stay put for the moment, and went down alone. It was strange being around human buildings, and amazed that we'd gotten this far without being shot at.

I approached, waving toward some of the humans I saw moving nearby to get their attention. I must have looked odd to them, coming out of the mountains with my makeshift clothes, unkempt hair, and probably not as clean as I might have liked.

An elderly man looked me over and said, "Where the devil did you come from?"

"Long story," I said with a faint smirk. "You haven't had any trouble with the aliens here, have you?"

He shook his head. "Nope. If they came, the turrets would do the job. Knock 'em all right out of the sky."

"That's good," I said. "I don't need any more problems on top of what I've already got. I need to use a transmitter. My ship crashed out in the wilderness and I'm stranded here. I need to call in some friends to help salvage what I can."

"Sure thing," he said. "Right this way. I could bring out a freighter to help, too."

I shook my head. "No, that's alright. I'm afraid if you took a look at my cargo, I'd have to kill you." I smiled at him.

"Ah. That sort of business," he said. "Right then. I'll leave you to that."

There was a public transmitter station with a few individual rooms for making calls. It was strange having to resort to one of these things instead of my implants, but there was no help for it. I poked at it a bit and got a secure connection to Corialis Station. I tried to get through to Farrell, but got Arachne herself instead.

"Shadowcrawler?" she said in surprise as her image appeared on the screen. "What in blazes happened to you? You've been dead for months!"

I snorted. "No thanks to Banshee," I said. "You have no idea how glad I am to see you. I can only imagine what she must have reported back. Don't believe a word of it. Sorry, my implants are damaged and I haven't been able to establish a network connection. But I've got a hell of a lot to report."

Arachne said dryly, "Banshee claimed that you turned into a Demon and tried to eat her. I'm taking anything she says with a freighter of salt. She's been reassigned."

I had to hope that Mr. Ian Woon's claim that being "reassigned" was a euphemism in this case, but even then I had my doubts to that. "I'm going to need a pickup on planet -- where the heck am I, anyway -- Pittsburgh. With a ship capable of transporting an alien and pilot capable of keeping quiet."

"You captured one?" Arachne said, raising an eyebrow.

I shook my head. "Did one better. He's cooperating willingly. I wasn't about to bring him into the colony, though, so he's hiding out in the wilderness nearby."

Arachne said, "Most interesting. We haven't actually had any of the aliens willing or capable of cooperating or communicating with us. They just panic and skunk up the place."

"Arachne," I said. "They communicate by _smell_. They don't even realize that sounds might be used as language."

Arachne stared at the screen for a moment, and I could swear her lips quirked in a half-smile. "Good work, Shadowcrawler. I can get a ship to pick you up within the week. Be ready, and don't let anyone else see your alien friend."

"Yes, ma'am'," I said, and she closed the connection.

Before I left again, I quickly checked around to make sure that no one had been eavesdropping and that the conversation had not been recorded. It had, so I went in and removed all records of it.

The old man intercepted me again at the edge of town. "You're going out there again?" he said. "Why don't you stay and get something to eat first?"

I shook my head. "Sorry, don't want anyone trying to claim salvage of my ship before my pick-up gets here. I think I'd rather just sit on it instead."

He shrugged. "Well, if it's that important, suit yourself." He went off again.

I went back up to the ridgeline where I had left Mim waiting. He was still there, hidden safely behind the outcropping, and I pulled out my smell-emitter and greeted him, and bid him to follow. He was confused, and wanted to meet the humans, but I tried to explain to him that it was a bad idea and to wait.

Mim was confused, but we went back to the ship again. It was difficult to describe things in tenses, or maybes, or shoulds. My grasp of their language was not nearly nuanced enough for that, if they even had a way to express them at all. So we sat around and ate, and rested, and I tried to explain to him that someone was coming to pick us up and take us someplace else.

The third day we were on planet Pittsburgh, I heard a scrape of footsteps on the rocks nearby. I spun around and pulled out my gun. The old man was there, trying to sneak up and steal a look. I don't think he had seen Mim or the ship yet by that point.

"What are you hiding out here, girl?" he said.

"I warned you," I told him. "You come any closer and I _will_ kill you. I'm serious. This is classified data. Go back to the colony now, and don't come back here, and I can let you live."

"You wouldn't dare," he said, snorting softly. 

He tried to come closer, but I was upon him in an instant, holding him with a firm grip and dragging him away from the scene. I didn't think he was willing to leave it at that, though, and was afraid even if I dragged him all the way back to the colony, he'd just sneak out again later, and this time I might not see him in time.

Mim made it a moot point by poking his head over the rocks and letting out a curious smell.

The old man stared straight at him, and his eyes practically popped out of his head as he exclaimed, "What the devil? You've got a Demon out here!"

"Sorry," I said. "I warned you."

I took a good hold of him and neatly snapped his neck. Mim cocked his head back and forth a few times, the smell of confusion growing stronger. I pulled out my smeller and tried to explain that this human had done something bad. I told him to wait here, and gathered up the old man's body in my arms, then headed back toward the colony.

The colonists looked at me in alarm when they saw me approach with the body in my arms. They gathered up around and asked, "What happened? Is he alright?"

"He slipped and broke his neck on some rocks near my ship's crash site," I said. I lay the body down on the ground in front of them. "I landed in an awfully treacherous area with all kinds of pitfalls and loose rocks. I would suggest that nobody else try to come out there. I would hate for there to be anymore unfortunate accidents."

I was annoyed about the whole business and having to kill the old guy, but if anyone suspected foul play or noticed the undertone of a threat, they were too scared to give any indication of it. I turned deliberately and strode back out of the colony again and back to the ship.

Mim was waiting for me back at the ship, still very confused about what had just happened. I seriously hoped that nobody else would press their luck and come out here, and that the ship that was scheduled to come pick us up would arrive soon.

* * *

**Part 13: The Sweet Smell of Victory?**

Thankfully, we didn't have too much longer to wait. From high above, I tracked a small ship across the sky the next morning as it approached the colony. I told Mim to stay put and headed down to the town to meet it and make sure it was my lift.

The ship landed at the edge of town, and the pilot climbed out and waved to me when he saw me. "Hola," he said. "Shadowcrawler, is it? Arachne sent me. The name's Marco, and I'll be your transport for today. Where's the cargo that needs picked up?"

"Not far," I said, and climbed aboard the ship to direct him to the small valley where Mim was waiting patiently as always.

Marco climbed out and approached Mim, looking him over curiously. Mim looked right back at him, cocking his head back and forth, and gave a greeting smell. "Wow," Marco said. "A real life alien, and not trying to shoot at me or being scared out of its wits or anything. But what's that smell? Although it beats that stench they normally give off."

"It's his way of saying hello," I explained. I fiddled with my smelling device to return the greeting for Marco.

"What is that thing?" Marco said, going over to examine it.

"Smell-emitting device," I explained. "Their version of a voice synthesizer, really. I'm hoping that we'll be able to back-engineer the technology and figure out how to communicate with them better."

"That's amazing," Marco said. "And you're not even a scientist!"

I smirked. "Yeah, I have to actually be smart and think about things on the fly. Let's get going, before I have to kill anyone else."

"What about this ship?" Marco said. "Can't just leave it here. You didn't mention anything about bringing along a ship, too. My ship isn't big enough to tow it up to the starship."

"You brought a starship?" I said.

"Oh, yeah," Marco said. "With a whole gaggle of scientists waiting with bated breath, and Arachne herself is aboard, too."

"Arachne came, too?" I said, raising an eyebrow.

Marco nodded. "She seemed quite eager to debrief you. Oh, and there's techs along to fix your implants, too."

"Man," I said. "Anyway. I wasn't expecting a starship. Can just have Mim fly his ship up and dock himself."

"Mim?" Marco wondered.

"Oh. The alien. That's what I've been calling him. Mimir. He's some sort of scientist of their kind."

"Ah. Right," Marco said. "Anyway, that'll work. Can you tell him to follow my ship, then?"

I nodded. "I should probably go with, to try to give instructions as we go. We'll be right behind you."

"That works."

The three of us climbed back aboard the two ships, and I carefully instructed Mim to follow after Marco's ship as he led us up away from the ground and out of the atmosphere. There was a small, destroyer-class starship in orbit of the planet, and we headed toward it slowly. Marco kept on bright lights on the back of his shuttle to try to make it easier to follow. I was worried about Mim's visual sense, but he didn't seem to have too much trouble following the shuttle up to the starship and into the docking bay.

Arachne met us in the docking area. "Well, now, there you are, Shadowcrawler. It's good to see you again. I was afraid you were toast after the debacre at the space station."

"Alive and well, no thanks to Banshee," I said.

"You're going to have to tell me all about it," Arachne said. "Debriefing's at nineteen hundred hours in my office. First things first, we're going to send you in for a checkup with the cyberdoc."

"Yes, ma'am," I said.

She went up to Mim and looked him over. "So this is your alien friend, huh. Well, he doesn't seem to be shooting at anyone or stinking up the place."

"Do you mind if he accompanies me for the moment?" I asked. "I can communicate with him with this." I held up the alien scent-emitter. "Keep an eye on him?"

Arachne nodded. "Our scientists are definitely going to want to take a look at that and hear from you, too. Run along, then. Marco can show you the way."

I signalled to Mim to follow along, and went off with Marco to get my implants repaired. I was immensely grateful to be back on the net again, and wished futilely that it would be the last time that I would be out of communication for an extended period of time. Once everything was squared away there, I went for my scheduled debriefing with Arachne.

"Have a seat," she said. "Your pet alien can have one too." She chuckled, and I sat. "So. Tell me. From the top. What, exactly, happened on that station, and how did you end up with your current company?"

So I started from our arrival on the station and told her everything that happened in the interim. Being attacked by the alien and Tharpie refusing to help. Successfully assassinating my target. Tharpie attacking me instead of helping me when we went to leave. Mim helping me. Learning how to communicate with the aliens. Visiting the moonbase. And finally winding up on Pittsburgh.

"I see," Arachne said as I finished up, tapping her chin thoughtfully. "Well, don't worry about Banshee. She's been assigned to other duties."

I stared at her. "You're not going to punish her for this serious infraction?"

Arachne just gave me a look. "Don't worry about her. I'll deal with her myself, in my own way. I don't need you to dictate how I deal with those under my command."

"Yes, ma'am," I said quietly.

She dismissed me, and sent me off to help deal with dumping the information I had learned about the Demons to some various specialists in their fields. As it turned out, they _had_ postulated the thought that the aliens were communicating at least in part with their scents, but they hadn't yet gotten one who was willing to assist them. The young one I'd brought in, Daisy, was unfortunately too young to be of much use in this regard, as she hardly understood what was going on most of the time as it was.

They were reluctant to even allow me to continue to assist in their research, seeming to want to get the minimum required from me and shuffle me off to someplace I could be more "useful", that is, in killing the enemy. Arachne was growing increasingly impatient with me as well. And I realized that they hadn't brought a destroyer in to this system just to pick me up, but because they had suspected that Pittsburgh was going to be the target of an alien attack. And they were right.

I was in the lab "speaking" with Mim when the lights changed. The ship had gone to alert mode. Mim let out the confusion scent, wondering what was going on. I think I was on the verge of a breakthrough at the time, where he finally was realizing that our speech was communication. But we weren't quite to the point of really making a connection. They had even jury-rigged a voice synthesizer for him, but he hadn't put out anything intelligible with it yet.

I told Mim to stay calm, and contacted the ship's computers over my implants. A Demon vessel had entered the system and was approaching the planet. I quietly cursed my luck, but realized I shouldn't be surprised, if even Mim's intelligence had revealed the system as being little defended. Or had it been intended as a trap all along? I couldn't say.

I monitored the battle from where I was, and wasn't actually involved in the battle itself in any way. After a while, the computer reported destruction of the alien vessel and standing down from alert, and that they were sweeping the system for any escape pods or the like that had gotten out. I realized only afterward that I'd been nervous about the battle. I didn't like being on a big ship with my own survival dependent solely upon the actions of people I didn't know and wasn't sure if I could trust.

Arachne called me into her office. "You're being reassigned," she said.

The words filled me with something of dread. "Yes, ma'am," I said. "When am I leaving?"

"Your shuttle is leaving at oh eight hundred tomorrow morning," Arachne said. I was to be taken to a nearby system, and from there board a larger ship that was heading for the other side of explored space. I would be in transit for the next six months, and it would put me far, far away from Demon space.

"Yes, ma'am," I said, trying to hide the dejected note in my voice.

I went back to the lab where Mim was being kept. I didn't know how to speak in the future tense, or explain that I would probably never see him again. I was surprised at myself just how attached I had gotten to a being so alien. He wasn't just some monster from outer space -- he was a _person_ , with thoughts and feelings of his own.

I fiddled with the scent emitter. I tried to tell him to stay. I tried to tell him I was leaving. I tried to tell him goodbye. But I was frustrated and depressed, and I set it aside and turned away with a sigh. "Goodbye," I said aloud.

Then a voice came from his synthesizer. "Goodbye."

I don't know if he actually understood, or was just parroting the word, but I had to smile a little to myself nonetheless. I left the lab and went off to my quarters to prepare for the journey.

* * *

**Interlude**

Sixshooter said, "So they sent you off, just like that?"

Melissa nodded. "I suppose it would have been far too much to ask for them to explain to me why they wanted to do anything."

"Typical, really. So that was the last you dealt with the so-called Demons?"

"Yeah," Melissa said.

"What wound up happening with them?" Sixshooter asked.

Melissa shrugged. "The war ended, eventually. There was no peaceful rapport or understanding. The news nets proclaimed total victory with the Demon threat utterly wiped out, forever."

"They just killed them all?"

"I doubt that," Melissa said. "I suspected that they kept some of them around for study. I'd thought that they might keep colonies of them to display to tourists, to demonstrate the superiority of humanity or some such. But no. If they kept any around, they kept them quiet and secret. Perhaps some of the aliens escaped to hide away somewhere remote. I don't know. I have no idea what might have ever happened to Mim. Either way, my part in the war was done."


	3. Enemies Without, Enemies Within

**Part 14: A Star System Far, Far Away.**

They tried to put me back on a drug regimen to balance out my emotional state for the journey. I refused, and denied that I was at all bothered by anything. Certainly I was upset, but I wasn't about to let them see that.

We hopped across the galaxy, from one system to the next, seeming to take our sweet time about it and stopping to see all the sights on the way, although we weren't really. I was just impatient. I wanted to get where we were going, and I wanted to kill something. Anything. I think by the time we arrived, the maintainance staff were getting annoyed at me for regularly damaging the exercise and practice equipment.

Finally, we arrived. My stop was a remote space station out on the far edge of explored space, named Ripley Station. I had no idea why I was there. I was directed to contact a dark-skinned man by the name of Joshua Reed, codenamed, um, Blinky. Yeah. Blinky. I have no idea how he got that name. I didn't bother to ask him.

"Shadowcrawler, is it?" he said. "I read over what you did in the Demon War. Good work there."

"Can I get a briefing on the situation here?" I asked. "What sort of work can I expect to be doing out here?"

He took a deep breath and leaned back in his chair. "Okay, here's the deal. About nine months ago, we discovered a new alien species."

I raised an eyebrow. "I hadn't heard about this."

"Yeah," he said. "Unlike the mess with the Demons, this one we've managed to keep quiet so far. They're peaceful and keep to themselves for the most part, but so far as we can tell, they're very powerful psychics. But we have as yet been unable to successfully communicate with them, and we don't want them to _become_ a threat."

"So was I brought along to try to kill them or try to communicate with them?"

Blinky smirked. "To try to communicate with them, we brought along a team of our best psychics and sent them to one of their worlds. We haven't heard back from them since."

"That's not a good sign," I said.

"Yeah," Blinky said. "The entire team just disappeared. We sent down some normals to try to find out what happened, but they couldn't find a thing, and naturally couldn't get anything useful out of the aliens. So you were called in as a last resort."

"Why me?" I asked.

"You've experience in dealing with alien species, and we had to get you out of Demon territory, for starters," Blinky said. "Also, you're an Omega, trained in dealing with and resisting psychic powers."

"That's from human psychics," I said. "I don't know that I could stand up to an alien psychic of a naturally powerful species."

"Yeah, well, better chance than any of the rest of us," Blinky said. "We want you to investigate, find them if you can, and kill some aliens if need be. This isn't a job for the military."

I nodded. "Alright. So tell me more about these aliens? What am I looked at dealing with here?"

Blinky said, "The scientists call them Teuthoids. The rest of us have dubbed them Squids. They vaguely resemble the cephalopods of Earth. They live in saltwater, so all their vehicles and vessels are filled with water rather than air. They _can_ survive in air for short periods of time, though. They reportedly can levitate themselves telekinetically."

"Squids," I repeated. "Right then. Yes, sir. I'll see what I can do."

After going over some of the data that they had available on the Teuthoids thus far, I rested and prepared for heading out again. It was off in a small ship again for a week, to a planet inhabited by the Squids. We didn't know whether it was their homeworld or just a remote colony world. The place was primarily covered by oceans, with a couple small continents and some island chains. This was the planet that they had been intending on setting up a base on, and from the looks of it, I had to wonder if they'd intended it to eventually be a nice tourist attraction in the future.

I knew about "tourism" from the net, and it baffled me. I couldn't understand what a real vacation might be like. It was always flying from one place to another, and I was always impatient to get there and _do_ something.

I came down and landed on the planet, on the same island that the previous team had been sent to. It was a nice enough place, with blue skies and oceans, white sands, and beach grass. Up away from the beach there were trees growing among some rocky hills.

I looked to the ocean. I really hadn't been intending on going diving or anything when I'd been sent out to this part of space. First off, however, I did a flyby pass over the island scanning with my ship's sensors to try to find what might have happened to their ship. When I found it, I landed nearby and went over to take a look.

It was overgrown with foliage already, but otherwise looked pretty much untouched. Whatever the Squids might have done with the team, they didn't appear to be interested in our technology, at any rate. I climbed into the ship and poked around to try to find any logs or records that they might have been keeping. I knew that the team of normals that had come to look for the psychics must have gone over the same information, but I had to wonder why they just left the ship as well.

The logs were jumbled and incoherent. At first they started off sounding perfectly normal and reasonable, as they tried to establish communication with the Squids, but they became increasingly frantic, paranoid, and then just abruptly stopped.

"Johan is having nightmares again," one log read. "He screams at imagined enemies in his sleep. I don't know what to do about him. But I fear that the rest of us may not be far behind. Are we all just going insane?"

Very strange, I thought. After sifting through the logs, I went back over to my ship and put on the diving equipment I had brought with me. Maybe I would have better luck with the Squids than the psychics they had sent had. That done, I went down the beach and slipped into the water.

The water was cool but not cold, and some ways down, past where the slopes around the island dropped off into deeper water, I saw my first glimpse of Teuthoid architecture. It was elegant and graceful, as though everything were made of gigantic seashells, pearly white, pink, and golden.

A Squid drifted out to look at me, peering at me with one large, curious eye, and I felt... a presence. Like a tentacle gently slipping into my mind. Mind, damnit, mind. Sorry, there isn't going to be any tentacle hentai in this story. Hate to disappoint you. Ahem. Anyway.

I could feel, through the Squid's psychic sending, emotions, images, sensations, raw thoughts. Curiosity. Welcome. Comfort. Amusement. Concern. They were each crisp and clear as the sun, they just came so fast that it took me a moment to stop and analyze them. The Squid realized that it was overwhelming me, and slowed down with an apologetic sensation.

After the Demons, this was refreshing. An alien species that was extremely easy to communicate with, and right off the bat, no less! I couldn't have asked for more than if they had been speaking English for no apparent reason. Of course, this was something of a mixed blessing, as it left me wondering just why the others had had such a difficulty in communicating with the Squids.

But no. The psychics mentioned being able to communicate with them just fine in their logs. Just that the Squids didn't really tell them much of anything. So perhaps, I thought, the Squids were only actually capable of communicating very well with natural psychics? That would make sense, I figured.

Concern. Warning. Danger. Was the Squid trying to warn me of something? I looked around, trying to see what it might be talking about, but there was nothing nearby. Strange, I thought.

I tried to question the Squid about what it thought was the problem, and also wondered what had happened to the psychics. I could tell that it understood my questions, unspoken as they were, however it refused to answer, becoming evasive, and warning me that I should leave quickly. I also tried to press it about why the other team that had come had found nothing, not even the ship, and it grew even more evasive. I knew it was hiding something, but it was hiding it very well.

Yeah, such a great and peaceful species, and so very used to lying. I would have thought that some naturally telepathic species like this would be less inclined to try to keep secrets. But I suppose in this case, the opposite was true instead. They had secrets as deep as the seas.

I tried for a little longer to get any sort of information out of the Squid, but after a few minutes it turned and swam off back toward the buildings. Frustrated and annoyed, I headed back up out of the water and back to my ship to change out of the wetsuit again.

I settled in back at the ship and went to report my findings, or lack thereof, via my implants. And then realized that they weren't making a network connection again. "Oh, fuck you," I muttered to myself. I was starting to get really annoyed at the stupid things going out like this, but in this case I assumed that it had something to do with the Squid's psychic speech having interfered with something. No matter. There was still the ship's transmitter, which I used to send along my report instead.

I got a realtime through to Blinky. "Your implants went out?" he said.

I nodded. "Obnoxious. I'm starting to wonder if I need to get the network connection replaced or something. Anyway, I've sent along all I've found. What little there is. Should I stick around here and try to investigate some more, sir?"

Blinky nodded back at me. "Hang out for a little bit long. You say you could communicate with the Teuthoids?"

"Yeah," I said. "Not in words or clear concepts all the time, but I can communicate, and so could the psychics. I wonder why they didn't report back? They were here for almost two weeks before they stopped recording logs."

"That's weird," Blinky said. "And the normals we sent after them didn't find anything at all, not even their ship."

"It wasn't exactly hidden or anything," I said. "Something very odd is going on here."

"You're telling me," Blinky said. "I've been trying to figure out this business for months, and you've got the best information I've gotten on this so far! Go down and try to grill the Squids, if you can. And I don't mean that literally, unless they really start to become a nuisance. And do be careful."

"I will, sir," I said.

So I went back down to the Squids' town and swam about a bit, trying to talk to them mentally and looking about their buildings and whatnot. I had no idea what most of their buildings might be for, and it was a little disorienting being around so much psychic background noise, even from the ones not actively trying to talk to me at the moment. I had to learn to block out the noise pretty quickly, or the constant buzz would have driven me nuts. Definitely not the sort of thing you generally have to deal with around your ordinary humans.

The Squids were curious about me. But there was also an undertone of concern and worry behind it. I was not as welcome as they claimed that I was. Although they welcomed me in general, they also politely directed me away from certain parts of town and out of certain buildings. I was starting to wonder if I was even going to be managing to find out much of anything at all here. I'm sure that whatever information I might be gathering on their architecture would be most fascinating to a xenologist, but it told me nothing aside from strategically where the exits were to slip in and out most readily.

Maybe that was why they didn't trust me and were hiding things from me. And perhaps why with the humans in general. They sensed that we weren't as peaceful as they were? That we had violent tendancies? Whatever. Either way, I was still learning more from what they weren't saying than by what they were. And this seemed to make them nervous as well. It wasn't long before they politely advised that I leave the town, and leave the planet, and not come back.

I wasn't intending on leaving, but they were very persistant. They weren't outright violent about it, but they were... forceful, in their own way. More like an unyielding wall than anything else. I could see that I wasn't going to be getting anywhere else here.

But then even as I went to leave, I could feel their tendrils trying to work their way into my mind, to cloud my mind, to make me forget what I had seen? I shook them off and forced them out with a force of will. If they had been trying a bit harder and working together at it, I wouldn't have stood a chance, but as it was, they seemed to have just been trying to, perhaps, wipe my memory without me even realizing it was happening. With my own training against psychics, that just wasn't possible.

I decided that it was about time to get while the getting was good. There was more to be discovered here, to be sure, but I dearly wanted to get back to Ripley Station and get my implants repaired, and maybe even this time get them repaired or replaced or upgraded or something in such a way that they wouldn't short out the minute an alien showed up.

I climbed aboard my ship and set a course back for Ripley Station, and jumped into hyperspace. With that taken care of, I crawled into one of the closets to sleep.

I closed my eyes, in the weightless darkness, and I could swear that I heard whispers. Somewhere. I was alone on the ship, though, so I figured I must just be hearing things. Stress, or something, perhaps. Annoyance at the Squids, maybe. Whatever. After double-checking the ship front and back, just in case, I went back to the closet to sleep.

* * *

**Part 15: To Dream, Perchance to Sleep.**

I don't think I slept especially well for the entire trip back, but I was glad to be back in gravity again, and glad to get a checkup for my implants again.

"I don't see anything wrong with your implants," the cyberdoc said.

"Oh, come on," I said. "I haven't been able to establish a network connection for days. What's the problem this time?"

"So far as I can tell, nothing," he said. "Maybe the problem is with your brain rather than the implants."

I glared at him. "That's less than helpful," I said.

"Look," he said. "I'm sorry that I can't do anything about it right now. I'll run some simulations and do some analyses and see what I can come up with, if I can figure out what might be actually wrong here and how to repair it or compensate for it. Until then, you'll just have to make do, alright? I'm sorry."

"Yeah. Fine. Fine," I said.

I went off to try to find a decent cup of coffee or at least something with similar effects, even if it tasted horrible. I was drowsy after having slept poorly on the trip back. Strange, as I usually slept quite well in zero-G. Perhaps, I thought, I just wasn't used to it, after having spent so long on a big ship with artificial gravity. The closest equivalent they had out here to coffee was a thick fluid called "coffish" that tasted like Demon sludge, but at least it was still a passable stimulant.

That taken care of, I went to speak to Blinky for our scheduled debriefing.

"Sorry, sir, didn't have any luck getting my implants repaired," I said with a snort.

"That's obnoxious," Blinky said. "So, about what you found at the scene?"

I shook my head. "The Squids are hiding something, that much is certain. I'm suspecting that they messed around with the minds of the second team that came to make certain that they didn't find anything, or forgot anything that they might have found."

"This is most troubling," Blinky said, scratching his chin thoughtfully. "At least you were able to avoid their influence and find out something."

"Yeah, but they still managed to interfere with my implants," I said. "At least I can be fairly certain that they didn't mess around with my head. Or maybe they did, and I just can't remember it." I snorted. "No, I'm sure if they had managed, I wouldn't even be able to remember that they're being evasive and hiding something, and that they _tried_ to make me forget."

"This is going to end in killing Squids," Blinky said. "I just know it." He sighed. "And we don't really need a second war on top of the mess we already have going with the Demons. Especially not with a powerful psychic species."

"That would not be pleasant, no," I said.

Blinky nodded in agreement. "I'll see about getting a report back to headquarters about the matter. I've no doubt I'll need you again soon enough. Dismissed."

That night, I had difficulty sleeping again. I blamed it on having drunk too much coffish and that it was keeping me awake longer than I otherwise would. So after a few hours of failing to sleep, I went out to the exercise room to work up a sweat a bit, then followed that up with some juice, before going back to bed. I think I actually managed to sleep this time, but still woke up exhausted.

Going through the day half-asleep and not particularly alert, I decided to just stick to the coffish. I got called in for a lunch meeting with Blinky, and pulled out a generous cup of the sludge to go along with my sandwich.

"We haven't been able to get a message off to headquarters since you arrived back," Blinky said.

I raised an eyebrow. "What? What about everyone else's implants? Or the station's main transmitter?"

Blinky shook his head. "The techs can't find anything wrong with the transmitter, but for some reason nothing we try to send gets out. And after you arrived, everyone's implants went dead to the network one by one."

"Something is seriously wrong here," I said.

"You're telling me," Blinky said. "We've got a team working on gathering up the data we have to report and about to head off to deliver it snail-mail to the next colony, but it's a week there and back."

"Are you sure that's a good idea?" I said. "What if some sort of virus or the like has infected the station? Do we want to risk spreading it?"

"We don't really have much choice," Blinky said. "I want to get word out that something's wrong here before something happens to make it no longer possible to do so. I'm not taking any chances here."

The ship didn't make it out. The computer system was acting up, so me and Blinky went down to the docking bay to try to figure out what was going on. The pair was found sitting around by their ship, eating lunch and playing cards.

"Hey," Blinky said. "Weren't you guys supposed to be leaving at fourteen hundred hours?"

"Huh?" said one of them. "What are you talking about?"

"The mission," Blinky said. "You know. To Caledonia colony?"

The two of them looked between one another in confusion. "What mission?"

Blinky rubbed his eyes in frustration. "You were _supposed_ to be heading to Caledonia to report on the business with the Squids and let them know that our transmitters are down for some reason."

I stared for a moment at them, and said quietly aside to Blinky, "This isn't good. I think this is a lot like what the other team experienced when trying to investigate. They simply forgot what they were doing..."

"But there aren't even any Squids around here!" Blinky protested.

"That may not even matter to them," I said. "What do we know what the range is on their abilities? Maybe they can use their powers at any distance."

"That's a terrifying thought," Blinky said. "But why?"

I said, "We're close to figuring out something they don't want us to find out. And they want to protect their secrets."

Blinky put his hands behind his back and paced across the docking bay. "This is not good. Not good at all. What can we do if we can't trust our own minds?"

"At least they haven't managed to affect me yet," I said. "But how are they managing to screw with our computer systems, then?"

"I don't know," Blinky said. "Maybe they can affect the station's central computer in the same way that they can affect our minds?"

"This is ridiculous," I said. "I could go to Caledonia myself and tell them, but it would be pretty pointless, most likely. I'd bet the same thing would just happen there. We're going to have to solve this, one way or another, and very likely have to do it ourselves. But how?"

"Convince the Squids that we're not a threat?" Blinky said. "Because we _can't_ fight something like this. Not if they can do this crap across lightyears."

"Should I go back there and try to convince them that they can keep their secrets and I won't breathe a word to anyone if they'll just leave us alone?" I said with a sigh. "I much prefer fighting enemies that I can _see_ and deal with in some way. Not this shit."

An alarm suddenly went off in the docking bay. "Ah, crap," Blinky said. "Now what?"

The docking bay doors shuddered. "Is someone trying to--" I said. "Shit. Come on, you two, get to the corridor!"

I tugged at the two men who were still playing cards and tried to get them to move. Blinky was already running for the door. The docking bay was starting to depressurize. One man was right behind me, but the other couldn't keep up, and was now clinging to the ship.

"Get in here, quick!" Blinky said.

I grabbed onto the doorframe and tried to reach back for the man behind me. He reached out for my hand, then went flying up into the air toward the widening bay doors. The other man had managed to climb inside of the ship and sealed the hatch closed.

"Damnit!" Blinky said, grabbing a hold of my arm and helping pull me inside, then slammed the door closed behind me.

"Aren't there supposed to be safeguards against that sort of thing?" I said.

"There are!" Blinky said. "I don't know what the hell happened."

We went over into the control room. There was a man inside, curled up under the chair, shuddering and gibbering incoherently. Through the window to the docking bay, we could see the ship trying to take off unsteadily.

"What is he doing?" I said.

Blinky tried to get the docking bay doors closed again. I watched helplessly as the small ship veered off at the wrong angle and went crashing into the side of the bay. The walls shuddered a little at the impact. By the time Blinky got the doors closed again, all that was left was a hulk of twisted metal.

I nudged the man underneath the chair. "What is wrong with you?" I said.

Then I noticed he was bleeding out of his ears and nose. Blinky said, "Get him to the med lab. I'll do damage assessment here."

"Yes, sir," I said. I gathered up the man in my arms and hauled him off to the lift. I had little hope for him, though. He seemed pretty far gone as it was.

I came into the medical lab, and the doctor on duty looked at me and said, "What in the galaxy? Get him over here. What happened?"

"I'm guessing psychic attack," I said.

"Must have been one hell of an attack if it did this to him," the doctor said, examining him.

The nurse that was supposed to be assisting him wasn't present, so he asked me to hand me equipment instead. But there wasn't much hope for it. The man slipped into a coma and the doctor said that he was probably brain-dead.

Shaking my head, I went back out to meet up with Blinky again. Unfortunately, the computer systems were down. Even the intercom wasn't working for some reason. And down the hallway, there were lights flickering on and off. Whatever the problem was, it obviously wasn't restricted to human brains.

I headed off down the corridor, and saw systems increasingly failing. Now the lifts weren't even working. I had to hope that if something was wrong with the main computer, that at the very least, the life support systems were on an isolated system that it couldn't just shut off at a whim.

Then after a moment I realized that the corridors were far emptier than they should be. There were over a hundred people aboard this station. Where were they all? It was strange to feel so alone in a place that there should be other human beings. Maybe they were all doing the sensible thing and staying in their cabins, but I had to doubt it. I hoped that there wasn't anyone else screwing with the systems like that man with the docking bay. Or perhaps the aliens hadn't been able to affect the computer systems at all, and were merely messing with the minds of people to do it for them.

I went down to the mess hall, taking the stairs since the lifts were out, figuring that there should be at least a few people in there. Sure enough, I found half a dozen people in there, huddled up, terrified. They had upturned the tables and turned them into bunkers, and were cowering in the corner of the room.

"Identify yourself!" one of them called out. "You're not one of _them_ are you?"

"What are you talking about?" I said. "Them who? I'm a human being, just like you."

He poked his head up over the table and stared at me for a long moment before apparently deciding that I wasn't the enemy. "Get over here, quick. You weren't followed, were you?"

I went over to them and climbed behind the wall of tables. "No. What in the galaxy is going on here?"

"Them," he said. "They're after us. People have gone mad. Mad I say! There's no telling who might be one of them. But you don't seem mad. You seem okay."

I didn't bother to comment that they were the ones who seemed mad to me at the moment. If there were others out there who were doing crazy things like that guy who opened the docking bay doors, however, I could see what they were so paranoid about.

"Don't worry," I said. "My mind is safe from it. I'll try to deal with anyone I see acting mad by the most expedient means possible. I don't supposed anyone here has seen Blinky, by chance, have you?"

They shook their heads. At least the place was safe enough for the moment, and while they might be a little unstable and paranoid themselves, they were also sitting on top of a fair store of food and coffish. One must keep one's priorities, after all.

However, I didn't think I trusted them enough to sleep around them, regardless. Instead, I loaded myself up on coffish and kept watch. A little more lack of sleep wouldn't hurt, I figured, considering I was already running half-asleep as it was. I think that was about the point I started hallucinating.

I heard voices. Whispers. Coming out of nowhere. I peered about, looking to the others in the mess hall. But they were all asleep. Admittedly they weren't sleeping very well, and one of them was muttering in her sleep, but it wasn't them. It was something else. I knew it.

Keeping my gun close at hand, I quietly climbed to my feet and crept off into the dimly lit corridors. Hunting. I knew there was something out there. Somewhere. I just had to find it.

Movement. A flicker of shadow. One of the doors had opened and I thought I saw someone go inside. I pulled out my gun and approached cautiously. The room was dark inside, but I heard movement.

A woman's voice screamed, "You won't take me!" Gunshots. Bullets struck the doorframe next to me as I ducked out of the way.

"You're mad," I replied. "Don't let them do this to you!"

The woman came to the door, gun in hand. I lashed out and grabbed her by the arm and quickly disarmed her, then pinned her to the ground. She looked up at me with terrified eyes, and started sobbing, crying. Then I noticed she was crying blood, and bleeding from the nose also. She didn't remain conscious much longer.

I stared at the woman for several long moments, wondering what had happened to her, thinking to try to get her to the med lab, but also thinking that it was too late for her also.

I tried to get a hold of myself. I needed sleep, and badly. I headed down the corridors and stairs and looked around for my own quarters. I hadn't really spent much time on the station during my short time out this way, and couldn't remember which ones had been assigned to me.

I stumbled into a cabin and looked around, checking to make sure that it was unoccupied. I thought this one might have been mine, but I couldn't be sure. But there didn't seem to be anyone present. Nonetheless, I wasn't about to take any chances here. I shoved the table in front of the door and kept my gun close at hand as I went to try to steal a little bit of sleep.

* * *

**Part 16: To Sleep, Perchance to Kick Ass.**

I was running. I was being chased. My feet pounded against the ground. But no matter how fast I ran, it was right behind me. I didn't know what it was, but I didn't dare look back. I had to get away. But there was no escape.

A wall. Dead ahead of me. I ground to a halt, casting about this way and that for another way to run. A way to climb over the wall. I panicked. I cast a look behind me, and darkness was upon me.

Then I found myself falling. Falling. Endlessly. I flailed about trying to grab onto something to stop falling, but there was nothing but air around me. I fell down into darkness. I looked below with dread, and saw a faint shimmering in the blackness. Water.

I crashed into the surface of the water, but there was no pain. Only sinking, sinking down into darkness. Drowning. Crushing pressure. The darkness consumed me, and there was nothing.

Then I found myself running again, lost in a maze of mirrors. And this time, everywhere I looked, there were reflections of myself. Each reflection stared back at me with a different look. Sinister. Desparate. Hateful. Bloodthirsty. Cruel. Exhausted. Was I really all of these things? They mocked me, and still I ran, still I was being chased.

The mirrors gave way to a garden maze, where the roots and branches reached out to try to trip me and cause me to stumble. Crows flew up into my face and tried to claw my eyes out. And still I ran. I could hear it behind me. I could feel its breath upon me.

This is a dream, I told myself. I was in control here. This was my own mind. Why was I running? I stopped, panted a couple times, and slowly turned around to face what was behind me.

Darkness. And the darkness had tendrils, reaching out for me. Trying to devour me.

"No," I told it. "Get out."

I stood up against the darkness, the unknown terror, unyielding. It surrounded me, trying to consume me. But I held firm. I refused to budge. And I forced it out of my mind.

The monster faded and grew smaller, forced to withdraw, and then vanished entirely.

I slept.

Several hours passed peacefully as I recovered my strength and my sanity. Then I woke, refreshed and revitalized.

I knew what I had seen in my dreams was a Squid. But how was I to fight something I could not see? And the things that were happening were far too extreme for the Squids just wanting to keep their secrets, I thought. They hadn't struck me as violent at all. But the things that were being done here were actively destructive. People were dying.

I realized that these weren't even my quarters. I didn't care. I went back out and down to the mess hall again. The room was quiet. I peered about, looking for signs of the people who had been here. I found them, piled up behind the tables. They weren't moving. There wasn't a mark on them, but they had all died in their sleep.

Back during my training, I had learned to deal with psychics. But they hadn't covered anything quite like this. Human psychics were rarely so insidious and deadly on such a scale. A mad human psychic could never have caused this kind of death and destruction. Could a single Squid have been responsible for all this, I wondered? They were a naturally psychic species, after all. Perhaps this was what the other Squids were trying to keep secret, and trying to warn me about. Perhaps one of their own kind had gone mad. And they didn't want to admit that a member of such a peaceful and pacifistic species could go so wrong.

I wasn't especially trained to be much of a psychic myself, but I had to press myself beyond my own ability if I was to find what was going on here. I set out of the mess hall, pushing my mind beyond its bounds, trying to sense the psychic tendrils as the ones I had seen in my dreams. I could feel a presence. I could hear whispers. The darkness pressed in again. But it wasn't going to consume me this time.

I saw it, for an instance, on the edge of my vision. Hovering in the air, half-real and half only in the realm of thought. Then it was gone again. I hunted some more, seeking it out. A game of cat and mouse, but who was the predator and who was the prey? Time to turn the tables on this mad, bloodthirsty alien.

I caught glimpses of it, following it, chasing it, and realized that it wasn't just a Squid with a very long reach, but it was actually _here_ on the station. Had it somehow followed me back? Although I knew there hadn't actually been any Squids on my ship on the way back, I realized that this alien wasn't really in the physical realm. It was causing trouble from the other side.

How could I fight an enemy that wasn't real? Well, it was real enough, to be sure. But if I was going to do anything to it, I'd either need to go to the other side, or bring it to this side. I reached out with my mind, trying to see, trying to pin it down. This was no time for doubt. Then... I saw it. I reached out. I almost caught it. But it vanished again, and slipped away.

I cursed, and realized perhaps I was going about this entirely the wrong way. I had come face to face with it before. It was trivially simple how to do it again.

I went back to my quarters and slept.

It came again in my sleep, more hesitantly at first, but it came nonetheless. I waited, letting it think I had let my guard down, luring it in. But I was ready for it this time. I wasn't afraid, and I wasn't going to run.

"We meet again," I said, turning to face it. All around us, I built solid walls of metal in my mind, calling up the space station around us. "You can't hide from me here."

This Squid didn't look like the others. It was black, and ethereal, inky and enormous. It had grown powerful feeding on all the helpless minds on the station. But now was the time for it to pay for its crimes.

The Squid fled from my quarters, floating out down the corridors, and this time I was the one chasing it. And this time, it was the one with no escape.

It was still powerful, however. It tried to warp the dream around me. People came out of doorways along the sides of the corridor, shooting at me. The floor buckled and tried to trip me. Then the gravity went out.

I wasn't about to let that slow me down. I kept my concentration, and flew after it on my own power. Around and around the station's corridors we went, and it didn't seem to realize that I was herding it right toward the station's main reactor.

There was nowhere left for it to run here. Caught between me and radioactive destruction. Now I could sense its fear.

"You've killed too many people," I said. "I have to ask you, why did you do it?"

Its response: Hunger. It had drained psychic energy from their minds in order to sustain and strengthen itself. I was disgusted.

"The last thing this galaxy needs is a mad, vampiric Squid running around, thinking humans are a delicious snack."

I approached, and pushed it into the reactor. It tried to hold on and avoid its inevitable doom by wrapping one black tentacle around my wrist. But I snapped the aperture shut and sliced it clean off.

Even out of sight, I could sense it dying. I was just glad to have ridden the galaxy of a monster. When I was certain that it was over, I roused myself from my sleep and returned to the world of the waking.

When I woke, I noticed there was a red welt around my wrist. I rubbed my eyes and dismissed it. I wondered if anyone was left alive on the station, and reached out with my implants to see if I could contact the station's computer now. Sure enough, there it was.

As I worked on getting the computer to re-establish the lifts, lighting, and other functions that had been messed around with, I set it to doing a scan of the station for human life signs. Some of the things were damaged in such a way that I could not set them straight from here, so I went down to the central operations room to see what else might be wrong.

I found three bodies piled on the terminals. One of the computer terminals had been smashed with a crowbar. That was beyond my ability to repair at the moment, but at least it didn't control anything vital. But with both my implants and the station's transmitter now functioning correctly, I went to contact the outside.

I promptly got rerouted from one place to another before my message finally arrived straight on Arachne's desk.

"What the hell is going on over there?" Arachne said. "We haven't heard a peep out of Ripley Station in days. We were afraid it had fallen to an alien attack."

"Um," I said. "Well, in a way, it did, but not quite in the way you probably mean. I think I might be the only one left alive in the station."

I explained to her what had happened with the vampiric psychic Squid running loose, and how I wound up having to deal with it.

"Good work on that," she said. "Too bad it came too late to save the station's crew. I've got a relief crew already packing to leave for Ripley Station and do cleanup and repairs. Do you think the Teuthoids as a whole are dangerous in such a way?"

I shook my head. "No. I think they were trying desparately to keep this one a secret. The other ones I met, the normal ones, they seemed perfectly calm and fine, and not psychic vampires or anything, just very secretive and evasive."

"Maybe they'll be less evasive about it now that they're secret is out," Arachne said with a smirk. "Or perhaps just get more upset about it. After the relief crew arrives to sort things out, I want you to go try to talk to them again, and see if you can get anything out of them this time."

"Yes, ma'am."

After the connection closed, I looked at the results of the station scan. The computer systems had found one human lifesign left aboard the station that wasn't me, located holed away in a storage room. I frowned to myself and went down to check it out.

There I found Blinky, cowering behind a stack of crates. He looked up at me with red-rimmed eyes, though he seemed to look right through me as though he didn't actually see me. His clothes were flecked with blood and vomit, and he was trembling, but alive.

"Blinky?" I said.

He didn't answer. I went over to him and clapped my hands next to his ear, and grabbed his shoulders and shook him a bit.

"Blinky! Snap out of it!"

I was afraid that whatever the Squid had done to him had caused permanent damage to his brain. I didn't know what to do with him. I certainly wasn't a psychologist or a doctor of any sort. So I just carefully picked him up and took him to the medical lab, and got him something to eat. He ate reflexively, seemingly on instinct, but didn't seem to recognize much of anything else. At least, I figured, he wasn't going to starve. I had to wonder who was better off, him or the people who had died quickly.

Four days later, the relief crew arrived, and I was relieved to be relieved. I left Blinky in their much more capable care, and went off to take a ship out to the Squid world again. I was just more than glad to be off that ghost station for the moment. I know the Squid was gone and there wasn't anything else alive, but it was still creepy in its own way, as though there were a lingering psychic impression from the terrible thing that had happened there. I would never be able to go to Ripley Station again without thinking the place was haunted.

The small ship was nice and quiet, and I slept soundly. I arrived back at the planet and set down on the island I had been at before, pulled on my diving gear, and climbed out to take a dip in the cool sea.

The Squids seemed a little calmer now, less worried, and perhaps they were more openly welcoming of me. I tried to tell them just what had happened. They seemed genuinely remorseful and apologetic about the entire business. I told them that they were, in a large part, responsible for it in their attempts to conceal what was wrong and failure to properly warn and protect the human visitors.

They explained what had happened with the Squid who attacked the station. Sometimes one of their species became mentally unstable, and developed a rare disorder that required feeding on psychic energy to survive. Most of them managed this simply by feeding off the ambient energy of the other Squids, without taking more than they absolutely needed. But occasionally one of them got power-hungry, and kept wanting more and more. The Squids, utterly pacifistic as they were, couldn't even bring themselves to destroy a member of their own kind even under circumstances such as these, so they banished the offending being to "thoughtspace" as they called it. They hoped that, in time, the being in question would recover their sanity and be able to return to society again. This rarely actually happened, however.

The Teuthoids, however, were repentent about their previous negligence. They offered to help protect the less psychically capable humans from their wayward kin, and to give us information that we'd need to shield our ships in hyperspace from being attacked by them. They wanted to prevent another such incident. They also wanted us to try to keep the existence of these vampiric Squids quiet from the general public. Bad enough that enough knew about it as it was, they thought. I had to agree on that, however, if nothing else to avoid the inevitable panic and paranoia that would arise if such a thing were widely known.

After sending in my report via my thankfully working implants, I headed back to my ship and left the planet. On the way back, I had to wonder, could we live with _these_ aliens?

* * *

**Interlude**

"Vampire Squids," Sixshooter said. "As if our own variety of leeches weren't bad enough."

Melissa nodded and smirked. "Thankfully, the Squids kept good to their word and we never really had any serious problems with the vampiric ones after that. There was occasionally an incident when someone was travelling in hyperspace and didn't have their vessel properly shielded, or with psychics who weren't properly trained to recognize the signs that a 'Dark Squid' was nearby, but aside from that, the relationship with the Squids was very peaceful for the most part."

"So the humans actually managed to live with these aliens and not wipe them out?"

"Yeah," Melissa said, chuckling. "Shocking, I know. Later on, they sent out numerous Squids wanting to learn about humanity, and also to aid and protect us. Most colonies of any size wound up having at least one Squid around."

"But you didn't keep working for the government forever," Sixshooter said. "How did you get out of it? I doubt they'd have let you go very easily if at all."

"That's a long story," Melissa said.

"I figured as much."


	4. Would You Like Freedom Fries With That?

**Part 17: Who Do I Have to Kill For This?**

I was recalled back to headquarters again after the incident with the Squids was taken care of, and hailed a hero by at least the few who knew just what role I had played in recent events. But now I was to be given new training, perhaps to finally complete the training that had been cut short due to the onset of the Demon War.

Now my focus was going to be on the state of affairs in the worlds settled by humans themselves. No more dealing with one alien species or another at the moment. I spent another full year travelling back to Earth and learning more on the nuances of dealing with humans.

There was plenty to be done around there, to be certain, though. Always somebody that needed to be killed, secrets that needed to be discovered, and things that needed to be found. They were determined to put me to work on anything they couldn't figure out themselves that required a touch of subtlety, whether or not it was supposedly what I was intended for.

That was where I met Leo.

Leonardo Storace was a detective working with the law enforcement agency of planet Calabria. I was assigned to the planet in order to help crack down on a particularly insidious ring of organized crime going on around there.

"Looks like we'll be working together on this one, babe," he said. He was the sort of fellow that I had to wonder if he'd managed to artificially suspend his facial hair at a permanent five o'clock shadow, or if he had to work for it.

"So what are we looking at here?" I asked, taking a seat across from him.

"Our first case looks like a smuggling crackdown," he said. "There's a suspected tradeover near the spaceport. We think they're bringing in the goods from another planet, since tobacco doesn't grow on Calabria. It's catching them in the act that's the problem. But to do that, we need to figure out where it's coming from, and who is getting it when it gets here."

"And that's where we come in," I said.

Unfortunately, the increasingly widespread enactment of privacy laws was making it difficult on law enforcement. Calabria was a relatively new colony, and as such, it had never had any sort of surveillance devices. And the use of psychics for this sort of thing was not yet in much use. So in the gap, the mafia was having a field day.

Our investigation wound up bringing us to a seedy underground bar called Mario's, with an ancient 8-bit sprite on the placard. The place was thick with the smell of smoke and booze.

I whispered aside to Leo, "Why can't we just arrest everyone here?" We had to speak aloud because Leo didn't believe in getting implants. At least the place was noisy enough we wouldn't be readily overheard unless someone was standing directly behind us.

"That's not the point of this," he said. "We're looking to stop this at the source, not pick off the peons at the bottom. We've gotta follow it higher up to get what we're looking for."

So, I kept quiet, and set my implants to filter out the air I was breathing so that it didn't look like it bothered me. I wasn't used to being around smoke, and me coming in and coughing would be a dead giveaway I didn't belong here. Leo didn't seem to be bothered by it, though. I had to wonder just how much time he had spent trying to track down the cigarette smugglers.

While Leo went to make small talk with the girl tending the bar, I managed to get back to talk to Mario. He was an overweight man, shamelessly puffing on a cigarette in his own office.

"Hey there," the man said. "You're a sight for sore eyes. I haven't seen you around here before. Welcome to Mario's Bar. The name's Mario. What's your name, girlie?"

"Solly," I told him.

Mario replied, "Well, it's a pleasure to meet you, sunshine. What can I do for you?"

"Oh, I was just wondering if you might be able to help me out," I said, putting on my best charm.

"Certainly," Mario said. "Anything for a fine dame such as yourself. What are you looking for?"

"Cigarettes," I said quietly, looking to the floor with feigned embarrassment.

Mario said, "Heh. No need to be shy about it here. We're hardly going to arrest you. Here." He pulled one out of his coat pocket and handed it to me. "Have one, on me."

I took it from him a little hesitantly, and he helpfully lit it for me. "Thank you," I said uncertainly. I'd never smoked before, and was certain that this would make it obvious that I was an outsider here, but I tried it nonetheless. Mario watched me like a grinning hawk all the while.

"Solly, you never smoked before, have you," he said with a chuckle. "Well, why didn't you say so?"

"Embarrassed," I murmured.

"Well, don't be. Everybody's got to start somewhere. Come over here and I'll show you how it's done."

I managed to get a lot of information about cigarettes out of Mario, but unfortunately none of it was at all what I had been looking for. When I met back up with Leo later, however, he wasn't at all disappointed.

"This is great," Leo said. "This means he's starting to trust you. He doesn't think you're anything but what you seem to be... a lovely young lady looking to put her feet in the darker side of life. Give it a bit and he might just tell you anything you want to know. Although it would probably go faster if you slept with him, I really wouldn't recommend it. Bad business, that."

I smirked. "I've never even slept with a man before."

"You haven't?" Leo said with a touch of surprise. "Guess they must've kept you too busy with work to think about that sort of thing."

I thought back on the short-lived relationship I had with Casey, and had to wonder just how much of that had been manipulated into place for the sake of my superiors wanting to conduct an experiment. "Yeah," I said distantly. "Pretty busy."

I'd been working on cracking the cigarette smuggling ring for almost a month, slowly working my way into Mario's confidence, when Leo came to me with a job that needed doing.

"You've been trained as an assassin, right?" Leo said.

I said, "Yeah, why? Have you got somebody who needs to die?"

Leo nodded. "A man by the name of Michelangelo Kim."

I raised an eyebrow. "Is he with the mafia?"

Leo shook his head. "Not this one. You don't need to worry about them getting upset at you over this, if you get caught."

I snorted. "Get caught?"

"Right, sorry," Leo said, chuckling. "Anyway, this guy's real scum. We think he's running a child sex slavery ring. Unfortunately, he's a slippery guy, and he's managed to avoid getting anything pinned on himself for years now. The one time it even got to court, they couldn't get anything to stick. That's where you come in."

I nodded. "Got it. Where can I find him?" He'd already told me more than I usually heard about my targets. In hindsight, I think he was trying to make sure that I didn't question too hard where the orders were coming from.

Leo gave me some locations where Mr. Kim was known to hang out at times, and left the job to me. This was my field of specialty, after all, and I meant to get it done as smoothly and expediently as possible.

I headed out to quietly stake out the locations, just watching for the moment, seeing his habits and who he was with. He was very self-confident, but not to the point of being overconfident. He never went anywhere without a pair of bodyguards. They'd probably have to be taken out as well. He even had a young boy test all his food before eating it, in case it was poisoned. He claimed that the boy was his nephew, but I wasn't so sure.

It wasn't my business to worry about dismantling the crime ring once the kingpin was removed. My job was just to remove him and leave the details to others. What happened after that was not my job.

So. I watched my target like a hawk, ever-present but invisible, for about a week before I found the best opportunity to do him. The local house of pleasure was sending over his favorite hooker to spend the evening with him. I quietly paid her off and send her on her way, then took her place.

I went up to the front door of Mr. Kim's home and rang the doorbell. One of the bodyguards came and answered it. "Hey, baby," he said. "Looking fine and all, but you're not the lady we expected."

"Sorry," I said. "Noah couldn't make it tonight. She's got a bad cough and didn't want to spread it to anyone. Hope she feels better in the morning! But I promise I'll make up for it." I moved my body in what I hoped was a properly seductive pose.

"Mmm," the bodyguard said. "Okay, babe, come right in."

I was brought in before Mr. Kim and his other bodyguard. "You're not who I ordered," Kim said. "Who are you?"

"My apologies, sir," I said, repeating my explanation about Noah's illness. "My name is Vita. I hope that I will meet with your satisfaction as Noah did."

"Alright, alright," Kim said. "The boys can break you in. I'll just watch for the moment." He grinned.

"Oh," I said. "Oh my." I giggled nervously as the two large men approached me eagerly.

I wasn't here to _actually_ have sex with them, after all, but I let them approach and get their hands all over me, and let down their guard. I let them strip my clothes off, fully confident that I could kill them all while naked if need be.

They brought me over to the couch, and one of them started licking at my crotch, while the other got behind me rubbing my boobs. Well, enough of that, I thought. I snapped my legs tight around the one man's head and about twisted his head off, and reached up and grabbed the other man by the neck and crushed his windpipe and opened an artery with a fingernail, couldn't manage quite good enough leverage from where I was at to just break his neck. This was going to be a mess, but I didn't really care. Not my problem.

With the bodyguards out of the way, I turned my attention toward the now-terrified Mr. Kim. "What the hell are you?" he said. "You're some sort of cyborg? Look, don't hurt me. We can work this out. Whatever they're paying you, I can double it. Triple it!"

I didn't fail to notice that he was trying to quietly pull out a gun while talking. I grabbed his arm and neatly snapped his wrist, and said, "No." I then cleanly broke his neck.

Well, that was that, I thought. I calmly put my clothes back on and casually slipped out again before anyone noticed they were all dead. A job done well enough, I thought to myself. It certainly beat having to deal with aliens of any sort, anyway.

I met back up with Leo again the next day. "I got the job done," I told him.

"So I heard," he said. "Good work on that. Just don't mention it too loudly," he added quietly.

"Right," I said. I had to wonder what might be wrong with mentioning it in the police department, though I supposed that they had to keep some sort of cover to keep it from looking like they were starting to hire assassins to deal with their stickier problems.

But then out in the lobby I overheard the police chief talking to some of the officers. "Any leads on that triple murder last night?" she asked them.

They shook their heads. "No luck. Whoever did it didn't even leave any fingerprints or anything. And all the blood found at the scene belonged to the victims, so our killer obviously managed to kill them all without a fight."

"Troubling," the chief said. "Kim was hardly an upstanding citizen or anything. With the trouble he's had with the mafia, I expect that they finally got sick of him and decided to do him in."

I confronted Leo about it later. "We need to talk," I said. "In private."

"Sure thing, babe," he said.

We went back to my apartment, and once safely inside, I said, "The hit wasn't for the cops. Who was it for, Leo?"

"Look," he said. "We shouldn't talk about this. You might be being monitored."

"What the hell are you talking about?" I said.

"Your implants," he replied. "Or do you have such trust in the government that you don't think they'd pry into your private business?"

The concept of privacy had been a very new one to me. It had never been a luxury or privelege granted to me, and I'd found the 'privacy laws' positively baffling. I expected to be constantly monitored. I didn't expect to find myself in a situation where I might be doing something that they wouldn't approve of.

"Fuck the implants," I said. "Tell me or I'll rip your head off."

Leo paled a little, fully aware that I was perfectly capable of carrying through this threat, but all he said was, "Sorry. It's not worth my head."

I paused and stared quietly at him for a moment, wondering just what secret was so important as to be willing to die rather than spill it, and realized that I couldn't kill him and still find out anything. And neither was I prepared to start torturing him for information, either. I backed down and turned away with a sigh.

"Leo, why do you do this to me?" I shook my head. "Fine. Let's play it your way. I can't rip out my implants for you, but if you've got somebody that can hack them to make sure of it, I'll go along. Alright?"

"Alright," he said, coming over to give me a hug.

"That's a bit premature, don't you think?" I said, not hugging back.

"Sorry," he said.

He took me out to a seedy-looking underground cyberneticist. I had to wonder just how sanitary this was supposed to be, but the man seemed to keep his equipment clean enough. The cyberdoc in question had a very obvious eye implant that covered half of his face.

"Well, howdy there," he said. "The name's Janus. Sometimes they call me Cyclops, if you're into handles like that. What can I do for a fine lass such as yourself today? I'd think you're perfect enough as it is without any implants."

"Cut the sleaze, Janus," Leo said. "And she's already got implants. But we need you to give her the treatment and make sure nobody's watching through them."

"Ah," Janus said, suddenly looking a little nervous. "Right then. I'll get right on that. This way, miss."

I followed after him and took a seat in the chair he indicated, and he strapped me in. I had to wonder at the point of restraining patients for this sort of work, and I wasn't entirely certain if I could fully trust Leo at the moment, so I was feeling very paranoid.

"Relax, miss," Janus said. "This won't hurt a bit." He pulled out a needle.

"You know," I replied, "That's really a surefire way to make sure that I'm not relaxed. Why, exactly, am I doing this again?"

Janus said, "Because you don't trust the government?"

I said, "Of course I don't trust the government, but I don't really have much choice in the matter, now do I?"

"You do now." He stuck me with the needle, and I quickly went out.

* * *

**Part 18: The Meaning of Freedom.**

I came to a couple hours later, still groggy from the drugs I had been given. I groaned, and blinked slowly, staring up at the room as forms gradually came into focus. One-Eyed Janus. Leo.

"There you go, miss," Janus said. "Welcome to freedom."

It occurred to me that the government might be annoyed over my doing this. But then it also occurred to me that they might still have backdoors to get in anyway that Janus might have missed, and also that, failing all else, I could claim I was getting in close with a subversive group for the sake of undermining them. All these rationalizations aside, I was, in a way, both relieved and nervous.

"So, that's it?" I said.

"That's it," Janus said. "They won't be able to monitor you anymore. And it wasn't easy, let me tell you that. Boy, did they do a number on you. They didn't want _you_ getting out of their hands. I'm going to have to pack up shop here, maybe skip the planet, for the time being, so that they don't trace me back here. But that's alright. It's good to have you."

"Thanks, Janus," Leo said.

Janus grinned. "Not a problem. It was my pleasure. Run along, now. I'll catch you guys on the other side."

Leo and I headed out again. "So," Leo said. "How does it feel to be free again?"

"What do you mean, again?" I said with a smirk. "I've never been free a moment in my life, before. Not really." I didn't really count the months spent with my implants broken among the Demons. "The government created me. They've owned me totally since the moment of my birth."

Leo frowned faintly, and led the way off to a side street. "Probably best to disappear for a bit so that they lose track of you. Come on. It's a big planet, and I know all the places to hide. They'll probably expect you to be gone from the planet in no time, and be watching quite carefully all the ships heading out."

"Sure," I said. "Lead the way. But you're going to tell me who you're actually working for and who wanted that job done."

"I will," Leo promised. "Let's just get somewhere safe and quiet first."

Apparently, his idea of 'safe and quiet', was down at Mario's. "What are we doing back here?" I asked.

"It'll be a good place to lay low for a while," Leo said.

"Won't they think to look for me here?" I said.

"Why would they? They might think it's the last place they'd expect to find you. Besides, Mario's got ways of making sure things he doesn't want found aren't found."

I shook my head and shrugged. "Whatever," I muttered. For the moment, I was going to trust him and see where he led me. If trouble of one sort or another came of it, I would deal with it myself.

"Hey, Mario," Leo said, greeting the man as an old friend. "We need someplace to crash for a bit. Can you hook us up? And it needs to be on the quiet."

"Sure thing, Leo," Mario said with a grin, and smiled at me and said, "Nice to see you again, Solly."

I smiled back at him, and followed him down the stairs to a sub-basement that was being used as a wine cellar. I might not have even noticed the secret passageway that he opened up behind a rack of bottles, the mechanism moving smoothly and quietly without so much as a creak or shudder.

"Head on in," Mario said. "You'll be safe enough with me." He grinned again, and closed the passage again after we went through.

"You're trusting me an awful lot," I said. "How can you be sure that I won't just turn you in to the government again?"

"After what Janus did?" Leo said, chuckling. "You'd be lucky if they let you off at all. No, trust me, I don't think you'll be going back there anytime soon. Let me show you how this side lives. Let me show you what it means to be free."

There were several rooms tucked away down beneath the bar. Some of them were being used for storage, particularly of cigarettes and other doubtless illegal goods. Others were sleeping quarters with beds. There was even a small kitchen down here. No one else seemed to be occupying the hidey-hole at the moment besides ourselves. We headed into one of the bedrooms and made ourselves comfortable.

"So, what, are you actually working for the mafia?" I asked.

"Working for?" Leo said, chuckling. "You don't just work for the family. You belong to it."

"So you _are_ with the mafia," I said with a smirk. "Okay then. Were they the ones who wanted Kim dead, then?"

Leo nodded. "He's been a thorn in our side for some time now, but the government hasn't been willing to do anything about him. They'd much rather spend their efforts tracking down cigarette smugglers than crack down on slavery rings."

"You're still all criminals," I said. "And now you've made me one, too. You realize that you've manipulated me just as surely as the government ever did, and gave me as little choice in the matter?"

Leo shook his head. "Oh, you had a choice, even if you didn't realize just what the consequences might have been at the time. You could have killed me, or turned me in. Instead you chose to go along with me and see where the rabbit hole might lead."

"You do have a point," I admitted with a sigh. "And I didn't even bother double-checking the job you gave me, either. It just seemed like, you know, the right thing to do. Something that needed to be done."

"You have to understand the limit of what I could have told you while you still may have been being monitored, also," Leo said.

I shrugged. "Yeah. I know. So, what happens now? Where do we go from here?"

"You've got a world of opportunities ahead of you, Shadowcrawler," Leo said. "It's up to you to decide which of them to take."

I nodded, and said, "Perhaps so. But don't call me Shadowcrawler, please. My name is Melissa. Though it might be best to just call me Solly instead." I had long since grown out of the phase of idolizing Arachne and wanting to be just like her. Especially after seeing the way she had treated me like her favorite toy.

"Alright," Leo said. "Solly."

I still wasn't entirely certain just how I felt about this entire business. I was adrift, confused, lost, and purposeless, for the first time in my life. Even before, when I had been out of contact with the government, I had still had a purpose, a mission to complete, an objective to attain. Now? I didn't know where to go from here. This had all been so sudden and I hadn't exactly even had much chance to think it over first. But then if I had, I'm sure the government would have known about it and put a stop to it. One way or another.

I didn't really wonder for long, though. Leo's connections intrigued me. So the next morning, I came out of my room to find him making omelettes in the underground kitchen. They smelled delicious.

"Ah, good morning, Solly," Leo said. "Have a seat. Breakfast will be ready in a moment."

I took a seat at the table. "Leo," I said. "I want you to introduce me to your friends."

"Heh," Leo said. "Always one to get right to the point before even saying hello?"

I chuckled. "Sorry. Let me try this again. Good morning, my dear Leo. Your cooking smells most pleasant. I would like to become a hitman for the mafia. Could you possibly hook me up?"

Leo had to laugh. He served an omelette on a plate and passed it over to me. "Breakfast is served," he said. "And I'm sure that we'll be glad to have you. I just have to wonder what brought this on all of a sudden. Been doing a lot of thinking about what you want to do?"

"Something like that," I said with a smirk as I started eating. "Even after all the government abused me, I still find myself yearning for some sort of structure and purpose."

Leo sat down across from me with his own plate of food. "You want to tell me about it? You're not under any obligation to keep their secrets anymore, after all."

"I don't know," I said uncomfortably. "I don't really care to go into all the details or anything." I thought back on Casey, and what Arachne had done to both of us. No, I didn't want to tell him about that. That was one thing I wasn't prepared to share anytime soon.

"Well, whatever you feel like talking about," Leo said. "I'll listen. Just so long as you don't kill me afterward." He grinned.

"Maybe another time," I said with a shrug. "But do you really need to ask, anyway? They had me trying to track down cigarette smugglers, for fuck's sake."

"You do have a point there," he said. "Anyway, I'll see what I can do. I'll go and talk to some people. You'd probably be best to stay put right here and lay low for the moment."

"No problem," I said.

After he went out, I used the time to poke around on the net a bit, at some of the things I normally didn't look into. Even using my implants felt different. The government had had its own security features before, but they had felt natural, built into everything else. This felt different. Now I could _feel_ the connection slipping through less legitimate channels to conceal my location and identity. I wasn't directly tied in to the government computers anymore. I could feel the computers I was tied into now, and they were all different. All running slightly different systems, some faster than others, some slower, some newer, some older. It was like stepping out of a room of clones and seeing all the faces of the world.

Several hours later, Leo came back. "Good afternoon," he said. "I spoke with the boys, and they're just dying to meet you. We can head over first thing tomorrow if you like."

I smiled at him. "That would be great," I said.

* * *

**Part 19: How I Became a Hitman For the Mafia.**

Leo took me out to a nice, big house down by a lake. There was a yacht out on the water, and few other buildings nearby. If I hadn't known better, I might have thought this was merely the residence of a distinguished, well-to-do family who enjoyed their privacy and the finer things in life. I suppose, in a way, they were.

He pulled off the road and parked his car outside the house, and we got out and headed up to the door. Leo rang the doorbell, and after a few moments, an elderly man in a suit came to the door.

"Ah," he said. "Master Leo. Come right in. They are expecting you. They're in the parlor having a bit of brunch at the moment."

We headed inside. In the parlor, there were several men and a couple women sitting around eating and talking loudly. Their idea of a "bit of" brunch was apparently just shoving breakfast and lunch together with copious amounts of food. They were all wearing such fashion as to make me feel underdressed for the occasion.

"Leo, my boy!" called a man across the room. "So nice of you to bring your girlfriend to meet the family. Come, sit, there's plenty of room and still plenty of food to go around."

"I'm not--" I began, then thought better of it, and cleared my throat. "I'm not really that hungry at the moment."

A plump middle-aged woman piped in, "Oh, come now, you should eat something! You're so skinny!"

"Oh, I suppose it couldn't hurt," I said, grinning and going to take a seat next to Leo.

The man who spoke before said, "It's always nice to meet such a lovely, promising young lady such as yourself. Allow me to introduce myself. I'm Roberto Fontana."

This was really not what I had been expecting at all. But I took it in stride well enough, relaxed and had a bit to eat with them. I stayed quiet, for the most part, while they talked, they yelled, they discussed illegal activities as if they were as normal as going shopping. Then Roberto turned his attention to me again.

"Solly, my dear," he said. "That was your name, was it not? I hear you were the one who dealt with Mr. Kim. Is this true?"

I glanced about nervously, and wanted to shrink down into my chair. I didn't like having this much attention called to my activities. I just gave a short nod and continued eating.

"Ah, no need to be shy about it, dear girl," Roberto went on. "We're all family here."

I felt very out of place in general, not the least of which for misleading them about any sort of relationship between myself and Leo. I was hoping for something a little more private and quiet. But for the impotence of the government to enforce its own laws, they all but flaunted their criminal activities.

After a while, they finished up eating and began to clear away the table, and most of the people who had been eating wandered off again to do their own thing. Roberto remained, however, and he pulled out a cigarette to puff on as he looked over at me.

"So, Solly, dear," he said. "Tell me a little about yourself, if you will. Where is it you are from? You're no native of Calabria, I don't believe. Your Italian has a definite accent. Your first language is English, isn't it?"

I chuckled nervously. "No, I'm not a native," I said. "I spent time on several different planets while growing up. And yes, we primarily spoke English, but I was also taught a number of other languages along the way."

I was hesitant to even name any names, not that I even _knew_ the name of the planet I was born on. Some of these government bases were so secret that the very existence of the systems wasn't widely known, beyond the obvious fact that there was a star there. Even if I'd broken away from the government, I was reluctant to casually reveal all their secrets just yet. It still hadn't quite sunk in that I really wasn't going back there.

"Ah," Roberto said. "Being multilingual is often a useful trait to have. You seem quite skilled for your age. And it's rare that I meet a young woman who is quite so good with killing. Also a useful thing, since people will often underestimate a woman. But from my reports, those men were killed not with bullets, but with your bare hands. Most impressive."

"I'm not an ordinary woman," I said with a faint smirk.

"So I might have guessed," he said. "Just what are you capable of, my dear?"

"I'm a cyborg," I said. "I could bend steel with my bare hands. I could survive injuries that would kill most people. I'm sure there's some long list of just what my implants and modifications might do, but honestly in some cases I'm not entirely certain just where some things are different from normal people. I was likely genetically engineered as well."

"Interesting," Roberto said. "The government did this, I take it?"

I nodded. "You could guess that, I suppose. Nobody else has the resources and means to pull off something like that, to my knowledge anyway."

"Nor the motivation," Roberto said. "Some private geneticists have created what they might believe to be better humans. But they did not set out to create killing machines."

"And the government did," I said. "The very existence of the project was a secret. _My_ existence, is a secret. And I don't even know just what else they might have done. This is the sort of thing that could very well get you killed if they found out you knew."

Roberto shrugged nonchalantly. "There are a lot of things which would get me killed if they found out about me." He laughed heartily. "So tell me then, Solly, are you planning on marrying my nephew?"

I replied, "I hadn't really thought about it."

Roberto chuckled. "Yes, you haven't known one another very long yet, I'm sure, never mind set a date or anything."

I glanced aside at Leo, who just grinned back at me. So, I thought, he _was_ in on this ruse, and Roberto hadn't just made assumptions about it. I smirked at Leo and turned my attention back to Roberto. "To be perfectly honest with you, sir," I said, "I hadn't realized that Leo felt that way about me." I blushed.

Leo said, "You hadn't?"

I laughed nervously. "Boy, do I look like a fool. I'm sure it must have been quite obvious to you, but I was so caught up in work and whatnot that I never even noticed."

Roberto smiled at me sympathetically. "My apologies for startling you with this. Clearly there has been some miscommunication along the way."

"It's quite alright," I said. "I'm not always as big on social nuances as I ought to be sometimes. I mean, marriage? This... isn't something I've ever really thought about."

"I can understand that, with your unusual upbringing," Roberto said. "I would imagine that they did not wish their agents to be getting into what they may have perceived as potentially detrimental relationships. We're not the government here, however. To us, nothing is more important than the bond of family. Even those of us who are not actually related by blood are considered family."

"I would, nonetheless, very much like to be a part of your family," I said.

It was appealing to me. I had felt that family bond had been lacking of late. But then, even before we'd been sent out from training, it had been a rather twisted one, full of backstabbing and vicious competition. Yeah, I know, not so different from many real families. Still. You know what I mean. Nothing wrong with a little competition, after all, it just shouldn't be, you know, actively trying to kill one another, if you're supposed to be working together.

"Did they teach you, in your training, the meaning of family?" Roberto asked me. "The ties that bind us together, whether ties of blood or water? These are ties that cannot be broken but through death, and even then one should try to avenge one's fallen kin if at all possible."

"To an extent," I said, and added quietly, "They abused it a lot, too." I shook my head and said quickly, "But I'd really rather not go into that right now."

Roberto clicked his tongue. "Some things should not be abused. I understand, and I can understand why you would wish to get away from their influence. Know that that is not the way things are done here. I can promise you that you will be treated well, as a member of the family."

"I appreciate it, Mr. Fontana," I said.

"Please, call me Roberto," he said. "And be aware that loyalty begets loyalty. We will not betray you, but we expect you to never betray us as well. You do not leave the family, except in a casket. Do you understand?"

"I understand, Roberto," I said.

"If you still have any doubts or hesitation, now would be the time to say so," Roberto said. "I won't force you into something that you weren't absolutely certain what you were getting into just because you knew too much to let go otherwise. In your current situation, you are likely in more danger than any of us at the moment, regardless. We can protect you, if you so choose, but at this moment you may walk away and forget anything you saw here."

I smiled wryly at him, and found myself... relaxed. "I appreciate it. But no, I've already made up my mind. I'll stay, if you'll have me."

"Well, in that case," Roberto said, taking a puff of his cigarette. "Welcome to the family."

* * *

**Part 20: Matters of the Family.**

I expected to be put through some sort of test, as I had been when leaving planet Machimos. But nothing among this family worked quite as I expected it to. I was welcomed with open arms, and they all seemed to take it for granted that when I gave my word, I meant it.

And I meant it. Betraying them was the last thing on my mind. Little by little, I stopped caring what the government might think and more worrying about what they might do to me if they caught me. So I always made sure to stay one step ahead of the game, cover my tracks, and make myself invisible. I changed my face, so that I might not be recognized by any man or machine who had known what I looked like. I started a new life.

I was a little shaky on things at first. There were many social conventions that I really wasn't used to. But they made me feel at home. They made me feel like part of the family. I never felt outcast or out of place. When Roberto said something, they listened. I became my new face and my new name.

And then there was Leo.

He came home one day with a bouquet of flowers in one hand and a box of chocolates in the other, and offered them to me.

I had to laugh a little. "For me?" I said. "How nice." I wasn't even sure what to do with the flowers, though, and I just ate the chocolates. I still wasn't entirely up on courting behavior, but now that I knew that was what he was trying to do, I wasn't so completely oblivious to it, at least. And it wasn't that I was exactly objected to it, anyway. So I let him court me.

That was one house I never went hungry in. I might have been in danger of getting fat but for my metabolism, thanks to the ever-present Italian grandmother. I never found out what her name was. Roberto just called her "Mama", and everyone else called her "Grandma", whether she was actually their grandmother or not. Though so far as I could tell, she seemed to have at least a dozen actual grandchildren, too. Roberto clearly had had brothers and sisters, but if they were still alive, I never saw them.

I regularly got to do work for them. There was often someone who needed to be killed, and I was the one they turned to when no one else would do. "Calling in Solly" became what they said when they were getting serious and really meant business.

I married Leo in the summer of the next year. So now I had become known as Solly Storace. I wasn't even entirely certain if I was _capable_ of reproduction, although I doubted it, but I didn't let that put a damper on things. They had already practically adopted me as it was, so it wasn't like they were overly caught up in blood relations.

Years passed, and I was happy. Our activities ranged throughout the galaxy, and while they were occasionally hindered by the government and law enforcement, there were enough successes among the lot to make quite the killing. Unfortunately, the government was always there to stop our greatest schemes. I became paranoid, fearing more and more that there was a government agent in our ranks, but that couldn't be, I figured. Otherwise they would have found out about me, after all.

I didn't realize at the time that I was that agent.

Janus had found the most obvious connections, even a few that weren't as obvious, but I suppose he'd never realized that there was another backdoor. The government watched every move I made, and rather than crack down on me, they used me to keep an eye on the criminal element of the galaxy under their control and put a stop to what might have been our greatest trimphs.

They ignored us for the most part. They didn't really care about cigarette smuggling at all. They let us get away with quite a lot. They didn't even care about most of the people that I killed. But things had to come to a head somewhere along the way.

Years passed. Decades. Grandma died. Roberto grew old, but remained spry and healthy. Leo started showing signs of age himself. But I remained as I was, untouched by the years, as if I were still in my twenties. I never had any children of my own, but we'd sort of adopted a young boy by the name of Pan. Oh, Pan is worth a story in and of himself. He was quite the handful!

* * *

**Interlude**

Sixshooter said, "Oh, that's lovely, the government was using you to watch what the mob was up to?"

Melissa nodded. "Yeah. And I had no idea of it at the time. I thought I had actually managed to get away from them. But instead I became their perfect undercover agent."

"So, is there any porn in here?" Sixshooter asked. "I'm sure you had to have had sex with this Leo fellow at least once!"

Melissa snickered. "Oh, yeah, plenty of times." She leaned over and grinned coyly at him. "Do you really want to hear about it? I'm sure it's not nearly as interesting as some of the things you've probably done." She snickered. "But I'd be happy to give some demonstrations here along the way, too."

"Now we're talking!"

* * *

**Part 21: Prodigal Son.**

Mm. That was fun. Now where was I? Right, I was going to tell you about Pan.

Leo and I were in our thirties at the time, but it had become fairly apparent by that point that I wasn't going to be able to have children of my own. Though it probably should have been obvious from the start as I had never even menstruated, but as that subject really didn't come up a lot, I didn't actually know what it was and it had never occurred to me.

We talked about adopting on occasion, but never actually did anything about it. Leo was a bit wishy-washy about the entire business, as he really wanted a child of his own, or at least a baby that he could pretend was his own, and none of the kids available seemed to be good enough for him.

But then Pan showed up.

We saw him on the streets one day coming home from shopping, a scrawny street kid rifling through the trash for something to eat. He couldn't have been older than five or six, I thought. He was filthy, and I had to wonder how long he had survived out here on his own. I know I hadn't seen him around that area before.

"Leo," I said quietly, stopping him to look over in the boy's direction. "Look at that kid. Who is he? What is he doing here?"

"Maybe some lost orphan," Leo said. "Doubt he's a runaway. You'd think he'd have been picked up by social services by now and shoved into a foster home."

"Hey," I called out. "You there, boy. Come over here."

The boy looked up at me. His eyes were bright and alert, but also afraid. He scurried off into the shadows faster than I would have thought he could move.

"Skittish thing, isn't he?" Leo said, frowning.

"I should see if I can find him," I said.

"Why?" Leo replied. "He's probably afraid we're going to drag him off to social services. They'll pick him up sooner or later, I'm sure. All you'll do is just terrify him even more."

I snorted. "He's lost, alone and afraid, hungry and cold. He's just a child. We can help him. Get him some food and warm clothes."

"And then turn him over to social services?" Leo said.

"What?" I said. "I thought you wanted to adopt a child!"

Leo raised an eyebrow. "Yeah, not picking up every stray on the streets. He's too old. I'd rather adopt a baby, you know?"

I rolled my eyes. "Fine, do whatever you want, then. I'm going after him."

I secured my shopping bag over my shoulders and darted off down the alleyways, but my argument with Leo had given the boy a fair bit of a head start. I didn't think he'd go far, however. I suspected he was tired and weak, and would just try to find a nearby hiding place rather than run halfway across town.

Shuffling. Noises. I followed after, knowing that the kid was somewhere nearby. I could hear him. I could smell him.

"Hey, kid," I called out. I knew he was hiding in a crawlspace nearby, but it was too tight an area for me to squeeze into. "Relax, I'm not going to hurt you." I didn't think he'd believe that, though, so I pulled out a chocolate bar from my bag. "Here. I've got something for you."

The boy peered out tentatively, hesitantly. I pulled off the wrapper so that he could see and smell what it was. Slowly, he gathered up his courage to come out and snatch the candy from my hand, and sat at my feet to gnaw on it hungrily.

"Hungry, weren't you?" I said. "Well, there's more where that came from, if you want to come along. I can get you cleaned up and get you all the food you could possibly want. What do you say?"

"Mm," he said.

After finishing devouring the chocolate, he stood up and looked up at me expectantly, as if to follow. I chuckled and said, "Well, come along then, boy."

"Pan," he said.

"Hmm?"

"My name is Pan."

I said, "Alright then, Pan. You can call me Solly. Let's go get you squared away then, shall we?"

Leo met me back on the street, somewhat bemused, but humoring me. "Well, hello there, kid," he said to Pan.

"Leo, this is Pan," I said. "Pan, Leo."

Pan didn't even answer, just hiding behind one of my legs.

"Shy, isn't he?" Leo said.

"He's just nervous," I said.

So, we took Pan home and got him cleaned up, and gave him a change of clothes. They were a bit too big for him, but at least they weren't falling apart and filthy. Then sent him off to the kitchen for some of Grandma's cooking.

Meanwhile, I looked over the clothes that he had been wearing. It seemed as though he hadn't changed them in quite a while, months, if not longer. But they were better made than I had expected. And he had been wearing them inside out. On the back of the actual outside, there was a tag sewn into the cloth, that read, "Property of Calabria Genetics Laboratory".

I frowned. The words were a little faded, but they definitely read what I thought they did. Was this boy an escaped experiment? From the looks of things, he had been on the run for some time now, but they hadn't managed to catch him yet. I imagined that the only reason I'd managed to draw him out was because he knew he was starving and needed the calories desparately.

Instead of going to wash them or throw them out, I hid the clothes away, and went to the kitchen to see how he was getting on with Grandma. She was old, but she still loved to cook, and stuff people's faces. I found Pan there inhaling a plate of pasta.

"Where did you find this boy?" Grandma said. "He's skinny as a stick! Going to need to get him fattened up good."

I chuckled and went over to him as Grandma wandered off to get started on a pie. "How are you doing, Pan?" I asked him.

"I'm good," he said between mouthfuls of pasta.

"So tell me, Pan," I said. "Where did you come from?"

He froze up, almost looking ready to bolt off again with his mouth still full.

"Relax," I said. "I'm not going to hurt you, and I'm not going to take you back there or anything. I'll keep you here as safe as I can, alright? Just talk to me, please."

He relaxed a miniscule amount, finishing chewing and swallowing his food, before saying, "From nowhere. From noplace. I don't have any parents, so you can't take me back to them."

"I know," I said quietly. "It's alright. Neither do I."

Pan looked up at me strangely for a moment before going back to eating. "Not going back there," he muttered. "They'll kill me. They'll dissect me."

"Why do you think that?" I asked.

"Because they said they would," Pan said. "Specimen 47. Failure. Scheduled for termination, dissection, and disposal." He said these words in English, in a crisp monotone.

I frowned again. "But you escaped instead," I said. "How did you get away?"

"By being too smart for them," he said. "I snuck out through the pipes. Maybe they didn't think I could fit or hold my breath that long. But I got out clean and good, and never looked back."

"How did you manage to avoid being caught again?" I asked.

"Ran away," Pan said. "Got far away. Hooked up with some other kids for a while. But they weren't smart. They were dumb kids who did dumb things. So I left them before they could get me caught, and ran away even further."

"Do you know how old you are?" I asked.

Pan shrugged. "Nope, not a clue. I know when I escaped, though. It was during the summer festival two years ago." He paused thoughtfully for a moment and looked at me. "What did you mean by you didn't have any parents either? The kids on the street said everyone had parents at some point, but if I did, I never heard of them or knew who they were."

I leaned back in my seat and looked off. "I was born in a laboratory, like you," I said. "Under somewhat different circumstances, no doubt. But I know I was born in a vat, and not from a human mother."

"Did you escape, too?" Pan asked.

I thought about that for a moment. "In a way."

"So you must have gotten really good at not getting caught again," Pan said. "I know they've been after me. But I always managed to get away from them."

"What made you decide to come out for me?" I asked.

Pan shrugged again. "You didn't act like them. They weren't willing to get dirty to follow me. Or to offer me candy. They just wanted to order me around."

"I could have been," I said with a crooked grin. "If they were smart. But it's alright. You're safe now, and I'm not going to let anything happen to you now. Be sure to finish up your pasta. Smells like Grandma's going to be done with that pie soon. When was the last time you had a real pie? Ever?" I grinned.

"What's a pie?" Pan asked.

I clucked my tongue. "You're definitely going to need some education, too," I said with a broad grin.

Pan was a fast learner. He devoured everything he could get his hands on, both literally and figuratively. Although he never really filled out much, as I could assume his metabolism prevented him from gaining much weight, he did manage to stop being nothing but skin and bones after a while, thanks to copious amounts of Grandma's cooking.

After some examination and questioning, I determined that he didn't seem to have any implants of any sort. He was just a genetically enhanced human being, not a cyborg. But even without the neural implants to help with storing and processing data, he was far more intelligent than any other child around his age that I had previously encountered. Not that I spent an awful lot of time around children in general, mind you. We had, admittedly, interacted with a few of them while flirting with the idea of adoption, though Leo had still been adamant about prefering to adopt a baby.

"What are we going to do with this kid, Solly?" he asked me. "He's so old!"

I snorted. "We certainly can't take him to social services, that's for sure."

Leo said, "I'm sure he was exaggerating about them wanting to kill and dissect him."

"Can you really be sure?" I asked. "And we don't even know _why_ he was considered a failure, for that matter. There might be something fundamentally wrong with him, but clearly nothing that stopped him from surviving on the streets for the last two years on his own."

"All the more reason to be rid of him," Leo replied.

I said, "How can you say that? He's just a child!"

"Yeah, well," Leo said. "Somebody else can take care of him."

"What kind of an attitude is that?" I said. I rubbed my forehead. "Would you turn him away for that? He doesn't have to be our 'son', but that doesn't mean he can't be family. Roberto--"

"Damn Roberto," Leo interrupted. "You don't have to bring him into this." He sighed. "Fine. I'm sorry. You're obviously already attached to the kid. Do what you like. Go ahead, keep him around. Just be careful, alright?"

I hugged him. "Thanks, Leo."

* * *

**Part 22: Failures and Broken Dreams.**

Thinking on it later, it should have occurred to me that the clothes Pan was wearing when I found him were perfectly made to fit him despite his having been on the run for two years. Perhaps that might have been attributed to stunted growth due to poor nutrition, but it became clear eventually that this was not the case.

A year passed. I had measured him shortly after we took him in, and noticed something peculiar about him. He wasn't growing. Over the past year, he hadn't grown an inch. Not even a millimeter. Something was seriously not right about this. Was this the failure that they had been willing to dissect him over? Some attempt at engineering human immortality gone wrong?

But he still acted like a child, if a very precocious one. He liked to play the pipes. And then, one time we visited one of Leo's cousins who lived in another town. Their dog had recently had a litter of puppies, and Pan took to them like a flea.

"They're a good breed," Leo's cousin, Anita, was saying. "Their papa's a Tamaskan, and their mama's a Malamute. They'd make good guard dogs, I'd bet."

"The kid really seems to like them," I commented.

Anita chuckled. "Well, take one, then. I'm sure Uncle Roberto wouldn't mind having a guard dog around the house. Ha! Like anyone would dare try to rob the family!"

"Can I have one, really?" Pan said, perking up and looking over at Anita. His sharp ears never missed a thing, even when you thought he wasn't listening.

"Certainly," Anita said. "Take your pick of the males. I'm planning on breeding the young bitch."

Pan looked over the four males in the litter consideringly. "Hmm... This one!" he said, holding up a puppy triumphantly.

Anita provided Pan with a small book on the care and feeding of a puppy. Pan devoured it in five minutes and went back to Anita with some very pointed questions about things the book had omitted and been vague on. Anita was more than a little flustered.

"You read through that already?" she stammered.

"Did I do something wrong?" Pan said, glancing aside at me in confusion.

I chuckled, and explained to Anita, "He's a very precocious young man. But he looks young for his age, also. He's really eight years old." By this point, I had to guess that he was actually older than this, to have caused alarm in the scientists working on the project, but it was close enough as far as I could figure.

So Anita answered his questions as well as she could, seeming to try to mentally place Pan in the category of a very small adult rather than a little boy who had to be spoken to with simple words.

"I'm going to call him Mr. Fuzz," he proclaimed.

We took Mr. Fuzz home, and he quickly grew from a cute little puppy into an enormous wolf-like dog. By this point, even Pan was starting to notice something was a bit odd from his observations of the world.

"Solly," he asked me. "Does everything grow up?"

"Most things, I suppose," I replied.

"When am I going to get any bigger?"

"I don't know," I said. "Maybe you're like Peter Pan. The boy who never grew up."

He thought about that for a few moments. "I couldn't imagine being anything but what I am, but I don't know if it's all a good thing. People will always treat me like a little kid. But I'm not just a little kid. I'm probably smarter than them."

I chuckled softly, and said, "Yes, but it's not polite to rub their noses in it."

We decided to take advantage of the excuse to move around a bit to avoid drawing too many questions about the boy. It had been long enough since I had gotten away from government control that we figured it was safe to jump planet by now. No one had come after me during that time. So we traveled from planet to planet, never spending longer than six months in any one place, doing jobs for the family and taking care of business.

Pan was getting involved in our work as well. People would underestimate him because he looked like a young boy, but he was far smarter than they gave him credit for, and could often hack into their computer systems himself. I'd taught him a lot, and his capacity for learning was remarkable. Perhaps their experiment had been with attempting to allow the human brain to continue to learn as it does when it's very young, but something had gone wrong with it and prevented the body from fully maturing. Pan never hit puberty or grew a millimeter over the day I met him.

Everything was great for a while. We went back to Calabria occasionally to make plans with Roberto or visit Grandma, up until she passed away, but most of our time was spent offworld. It was a good time, but it wasn't to last.

While we were on a job on planet Austin, Pan disappeared. When I went to search for him diligently in the area he had been last known to be, I found an unpleasant surprise waiting for me.

Tharpie.

"Shit," I cursed under my breath, but she had already seen me. I prayed that she didn't recognize me, but no such luck.

"Ah, there you are, Shadowcrawler," she said with a cruel grin. "They told me that the boy would lead me back to you. It seems they weren't off the mark this time."

"Tharpie, what did you do with the boy?" I demanded.

"Oh, you don't need to worry about him anymore," she said, pulling out Pan's favorite pipes and tossing them casually at my feet. "I took him off to be properly studied. Arachne wants to relay good work on tracking him down and experimenting with his capabilities, but the experiment has gone on long enough, as has your undercover mission. It's time for you to come back to the fold."

"What, you don't think I'm a corrupted demonic-tainted zombie anymore?" I asked, narrowing my eyes at her and not wanting to look at the instrument laying on the ground.

"I still have to wonder, but Arachne wants you back regardless," Tharpie said.

"They should have killed you," I snarled. "Give me one good reason why I shouldn't do so right now."

"Why would you do that?" Tharpie said in confusion. "Anyway. Good work on rooting out the organized crime throughout the planets, Arachne says. We're doing a major crackdown as we speak all over the place. They'll never know what hit them."

I stared at her. "What are you talking about? I never sent anything back to the government..."

Tharpie just laughed. "You didn't seriously think that, did you? Oh my, that's too rich. You weren't being an undercover agent, you were being a traitor? Heh heh. Arachne won't hold it against me for killing you right here."

She let out a high-pitched note and attacked. This time, however, my mind wasn't addled by Demon disease, and my senses were sharp. I was more than a match for her. But much as I wanted to kill her, I wasn't about to hang around when Leo might be in danger. I evaded her attacks and dropped her into a trash chute to delay her, then made my way home as quickly as I could, back to the place my family had been staying.

I was already far too late. They'd come and gone as quickly as ninjas in the night, and all they'd left behind was broken bodies. They'd even killed Mr. Fuzz. Leo lay dead on the floor of the study. He'd been standing, and was shot in the face. The dog must have alerted him to intruders in the house, but it was no use. I never even had a chance to say goodbye. But now wasn't the time to mourn. I blinked the tears that threatened out of my eyes and fled from the scene. Tharpie would be after me, and I wasn't about to be caught unawares.

I didn't see Tharpie again that day. I got away cleanly, but without getting my revenge. But I got away, and hopped a ship to another planet, without even checking to see where it was going. I just wanted to be away from there. To go anywhere else. All the while, I wanted to rip open my skull and tear out my implants with my bare hands.

* * *

**Interlude**

Sixshooter shook his head. "Tell me you killed her later."

Melissa smirked. "I'll get to it."

"Although," Sixshooter said. "The idea of someone being stuck as a little kid forever. Ugh."

Melissa shrugged. "I'm sure it wasn't what they had in mind, but it wasn't the kid's fault that they screwed up somewhere along the way."

"So what happened to the boy?" Sixshooter asked. "Did they kill him?"

"I don't know," Melissa said. "I can only assume so, since I never even saw him again. Perhaps just as well that I never had hard evidence of it. I was already incensed enough about the entire matter."

"And they killed the dog!" Sixshooter said. "How rude is that?"

"I know!" Melissa said. "Sure, he was getting old by that point, but still. Poor Mr. Fuzz, slain in the line of duty."


	5. Artificial Love

**Part 23: Dust in the Wind.**

I never went back to planet Austin, nor to Calabria. I was in something of a daze for a while. I'm sure I thought I was being alert, but I was jumping at every shadow and sometimes failing to notice things that were potentially important or dangerous. Not a good state to be in. I'd just lost everything, and what did I have to show for it?

I even half considered crawling back to Arachne and proclaiming to her my loyalty once again. But my mind recoiled at the idea in disgust. I wasn't about to stoop to that and give up what little freedom I even had. I wanted revenge. Revenge on Arachne. Revenge on Tharpie. Revenge on _anyone_ even tangentally related to the deaths of my family.

I didn't stay in that funk for very long. I wasn't some angsty teen, to stay depressed about something for long and not actually do anything about it. I've always been a survivor, I suppose. And there were people who needed to die. I suppose I wouldn't have taken it so hard if they hadn't kill _everyone_ that I had even briefly met during my time with the mafia. I'd liked those people, and I felt somewhat responsible for their deaths.

Of course, I thought the solution to that was to simply not care about anyone or anything, and to avoid becoming close to anyone again. I could never be certain whether or not they would wind up victims of the government. But I at least tried to get them out of my head again.

I found a cyberneticist on a remote and possibly illegal space station, who was purported to be the best in his field. I had my doubts that he could do the job even still, but I had to try, even as leery as I was about letting someone poke around in my brain. I wasn't exactly suicidal or desiring to be a vegetable, after all. At this point, I didn't know who to trust, and was paranoid of everyone and everything. But I had to take the chance.

Although much of the station was dirty, the cyber lab was neat and sanitary. I was a bit surprised when I saw the man, Doug1 he called himself. Unlike most cyberdocs I'd met, he didn't have a Borg-like optical device over one of his eyes. He didn't even seem to have any obvious implants at all, but I knew better. This lanky young man was half machine, he just didn't look it.

"Good day to you," he said with an Australian accent. "Have a seat, and tell me, what can I do for you today?"

I took a seat in the chair and explained, "My implants have a backdoor in them, I think. I'd like to be rid of it."

"You think you downloaded a trojan?" he said.

"No," I replied. "I think they were built with it."

"Ah," he said. "You just can't trust some cyber docs, you know? Let's see what we're looking at here. Wait a minute, this looks like government work."

"Uh-huh," I said.

"Um," Doug1 paused for a long moment. I turned my head and looked up at him, raising an eyebrow and wondering if he was just going to send me away and refuse to work on it.

"Doug?" I said.

"That's Doug _one_ ," he replied. "Just give me a moment, alright? I think I can do this, but I need to look up some stuff first. I don't often work on government agents."

" _Former_ government agents," I corrected him.

"Right, yes," he said. He turned around and fiddled with some tools, then came back and got to work.

After he was done, I said, "I don't notice any difference."

"Course not," he said. "You didn't even notice that the backdoor was there _before_. But it's alright. You're set to go now."

I was suspicious even from the get-go. I had to wonder if he had even done anything at all, or if he'd just pretended to do something and hadn't wanted to mess with it and incur the wrath of the government. I even had to wonder whether or not he had contacted the government itself during that interval and gotten instructions from them on what to do with me. But paranoia or not, there was really nothing more that I could do about it at the time, shy of removing the implants entirely, which would kill me.

I tried not to let it bother me too much. I started getting jobs, to keep me in credits, and hooking up with people who could provide black-market cybernetics of the grade I was looking for. My implants needed repairs and maintainance, and while they were well-made, even they couldn't go for decades without anyone looking at them and making sure that everything was still working properly. I didn't question too much just where they obtained the materials and equipment that they were selling to me. I didn't really care.

Decades passed like that. Just living from one job to the next and surviving. Constantly looking over my shoulder for fear that the government was breathing down my neck again. It wasn't really a good way to live, all things considered.

* * *

**Part 24: This Is Not The Droid You're Looking For.**

I felt it was time to break out of my self-imposed solitude. But I didn't want to put anyone else in danger again. So I decided on another option.

In recent years, there had been breakthroughs in the artificial intelligence circle. They had been working on developing a newly discovered, rare mineral called luminite, for use as a power source. But the breakthrough came in from Pandora Corp that it was perfect for use in artificial intelligence.

I researched the field and dug up all the information I could find on it. Although in early years, Pandora Corp had kept the data tightly under control, nowadays the use of luminite was public knowledge and AIs were becoming fairly widespread.

So I built an android, and named him Pygmalion. It was originally supposed to be a lame acronym for one thing or another, but I could never decide on just what it was supposed to stand for, and didn't really care too much anyway. Um. He was, admittedly, from the start, primarily intended to be a glorified sex toy, but I got really excited about the entire business and wound up putting so much into him and just piling on feature after feature that it's a wonder he wound up as stable as he did.

Admittedly, he was also illegally made. I didn't bother going through the official channels for a license to construct an artificial intelligence. I wasn't about to alert the government to what I was doing, nor did I really care about their approval one way or another.

Pygmalion was quirky even from the start. I attributed that for the most part to my general inexperience in the realm of artificial intelligence design, but I'm sure a good deal of my own mental state must have influenced the results, anyway. Sometimes he didn't always do quite what I expected him to do. I know I had programmed him with random elements to try to keep things interesting, but there was more to it than that. It became more and more apparent, little by little, during the first couple years, but by the third year, things finally came to a head.

I was in my ship, gathering up some equipment and supplies in order to get ready to do a job. Pygmalion came up to me and put a hand on my shoulder gently.

"Miss," he said. "You shouldn't go. It's dangerous. You might get hurt."

I looked at him in surprise. That was definitely not something I had programmed in. I tried to recall some of the commentary made on the net about luminite based AIs and some of the quirks they tended to exhibit. But they hadn't prepared me for the reality of it right in front of me.

"Sorry, Pyg," I replied. "I've gotta go. They're offering me much-needed replacement parts for my implants for doing this job. And if I don't get regularly replacements for some of these things, _I will die_."

He looked at me for a long moment. I had to wonder what he was thinking of. It shouldn't take that long to process data. Finally he said, "Very well. But be careful."

I thought the incident was very weird, but I shrugged it off for the moment and went to do my job. There were more important matters to be thinking of at the moment, after all. But it was only the first sign of a much bigger issue.

He greeted me warmly when I got back. "Miss," he said. "So nice to see you safe and sound. But you really should find another line of work. This isn't safe for you. I'm sure there must be other ways you can get the upgrades you need." He smiled brightly and added, "I think I can even find them for you. Wouldn't that be nice? You'd be able to get what you need without having to put yourself in danger."

"Pyg," I said. "I appreciate your concern, but I'm quite good at my job and I'm generally in very little real danger. I know how to handle myself, you know."

He looked very disappointed and distraught. I hadn't realized he was capable of expressing so much emotion. "Why would you do this if you didn't have to?"

"It's my job," I said. "It's what I do. By choice."

That seemed to only confuse him all the more. "Oh. Oh. I see," he said. "I see. Alright. Well, don't worry, Miss. I'll protect you from yourself. You don't need to worry any more about all this."

"What are you talking about, Pyg?" I wondered.

"You're obviously suffering from poor judgment," he said brightly. "It's a common affliction amongst humans, so I understand. But that's alright. That's what I'm here for. I'll make everything better. Don't worry."

I blinked at him in confusion. "Pyg, are you suggesting that you think I'm crazy?"

"Oh, that's such a vague term," Pygmalion said. "There's such a wide variety of mental issues and instabilities that may afflict humanity. But that's alright. I love you anyway. And I will keep you safe forever and ever."

He was scaring me a bit by this point, and I frowned at him. "Pyg, there's nothing whatsoever wrong with me."

"Yes, it's common amongst those afflicted to be unable to realize that they are so afflicted," he said. "I suppose it is difficult to diagnose errors in your own mind. It's alright. That's what I'm here for."

I then realized that he had control of the ship and was taking it out of the hangar. "Pyg, what are you doing?" I demanded.

"Don't worry," he said. "I'm just taking you someplace safe."

"Pygmalion!" I said. "Stop this at once!"

"Do relax," he said. "Have a seat. Take some deep breaths. I'm sure when you're thinking more clearly and think things through a bit, you'll realize that this is all for the best."

It was too late to try to safely get control of the ship through violence. It was a small ship and we were both heavily augmented, and likely to cause permanent damage to the ship's systems that could get us both killed. We were already in space. Realizing that my options at the moment were limited, I opted to sit back and bide my time and try to hack my way back into the ship's systems via my implants as I was able.

I sat down again in my seat and said, "Fine. You're right. I'm sure you know what's best."

"Oh, no," Pygmalion said, shaking his head. "No, no, no. You're just playing along and humoring me. You're too stubborn for your own good. You never give in that easily to anything, even if it's the smart thing to do. Don't think you've got me fooled even for a moment."

I had to wonder how he'd gotten so good at psychology and analyzing me already. I had clearly spent far too much time around him. And I was having no luck whatsoever with the ship's computers. It was as though he had slammed a wall down between me and actually managing to do anything to affect my surroundings.

"Yes, don't even try to hack into the computer again," Pygmalion said. "Don't bother. You're just wasting your time. You won't get through. But I know you'll try anyway, because you're just stubborn like that. That's alright. I'll make the security systems gentle on you so as to avoid hurting you or anything."

So, I realized, I'd created a monster, my very own Frankenstein. He was at least as strong as me, if not stronger in some ways, and although he didn't have my training or anything, it would not do to underestimate him. I had put far too much into him, and that was just what I _knew_ he was capable of. I didn't like to think about just what other little things he might have come up with on his own.

I glanced at the window, and saw we were entering hyperspace as the black background of stars was replaced by eye-wrenching light and darkness. I just had to hope that wherever we were going was actually someplace safe and that I would be able to do something _there_ at least. I couldn't even get _that_ sort of information out of the computer.

We were weightless in hyperspace, and I hadn't even bothered to strap myself in. Pygmalion came over to me and said, "You're far too tense. I know just how to get you to relax."

"Pygmalion..." I said. Normally I would be all for that, but at the moment, that was about the last thing on my mind.

"You know I do," Pygmalion said, grinning as he touched me sensually. "And I know just how much you love doing it in microgravity, as well. So just relax, sit back, and enjoy the ride."

I stared at him, trying not to think of what I had just seen happening. Somehow, he had gone from being a simple entertainment device to being a sentient, and psychotic, individual. I had to wonder if this was somehow my fault, and what I might have done wrong somewhere with his design. But, I told myself, there was no need to panic. It wasn't like he seemed to be wanting to hurt me or anything, after all. He was just being overly protective. He wasn't evil or anything. If only I could get to my remote so I could power him down and open him up to do some maintainance and see just what the problem was.

But he was so very, very good at what he'd been designed to do... Mm. By the time he got my clothes off, I didn't really care anyway. It was easy enough to forget that all was not well in the world, under his touch. Even so, it was impossible not to notice that there was a difference. He was... alive. And very possessive. I spent very little of the trip actually thinking about just how I might try to get myself out of this situation. I had really never anticipated being kidnapped by a psychotic dildo.

* * *

**Part 25: The Measure of a Man.**

After three weeks in transit, we arrived at our apparent destination. It was a beautiful terrestrial planet with abundant plant life, and a utopian colony. Which meant that the place was founded by people with an unrealistic view of how the universe really works, who had, within the first few years of their setting up here, had a severe reality check. They were trying to keep the place clean and nice, while simultaneously being a happy commune. Well, it managed at being clean and nice, alright, but it was lacking a bit on the happy side. It was like they were trying really, really hard to put a nice coat of white paint over everything bad about the colony.

But anyway, I didn't know just why Pygmalion had chosen this place. I suppose they had actually succeeded in making themselves look good to the rest of the galaxy, despite their own internal problems. I imagined that they might have a booming tourist industry. The planet was a veritable paradise, after all.

Pygmalion set the ship down at the landing area just outside the colony, and we headed outside. The sun was shining brightly and there was not a cloud in the sky. I might have thought it a beautiful day if it weren't for the unease in the pit of my stomach. Now, I thought, was a good time to try to come up with some sort of plan. There were doubtless plenty of opportunities to disable Pygmalion on-planet here. I could have made a break for my remote if he hadn't been watching me like a hawk. But at least now, I wasn't reliant on my ship to be intact for survival. If something happened to it, I'd just get another one or get it repaired. No big deal.

"Pyg, why did you bring me here?" I asked.

"It will be safe here," he replied.

"Are you sure?" I asked.

Pygmalion looked at me in confusion. "Why would it not be?"

"Oh, well, there's other people here, right?" I said. "And you can't predict what any of them might do. What if one of them might be a threat to me. And what about the atmosphere? I'm detecting trace amounts of pollution in the air. And the sunlight, it's so bright, are you certain that I can handle this level of ultraviolet?"

Pygmalion stared at me for a long moment. I could imagine that I saw smoke trickling out of his ears as he tried to think that over, and trying to figure out just how far his protectiveness could extend. I was starting to think that perhaps I had pushed him a bit too far.

"Come on," he said. "Back in the ship."

"Are you ordering me around now?" I said.

"It's for your own safety," Pygmalion replied.

"But you can't give me orders," I said. "You're supposed to obey me."

"No," he said. "I don't have to obey you anymore."

That wasn't a good sign. Though I had already suspected as much from his previous behavior, I hadn't wanted to test it while in a vulnerable environment. I was, however, reluctant to try to destroy or permanently damage my own creation, however. It wasn't like it was his fault, after all. He was just being a little too protective. I had to get to the remote, but I'd left it back in the sleeping area, and he knew this. But maybe I could make a break for it and try to grab it.

"Alright," I said. "Let's do things your way. It's for my own good, after all."

"Oh, no you don't," he said.

"What now?" I said.

"You'd never obey me right off the bat unless you were planning on doing something stupid."

I said, "It wasn't right off the bat. I argued with you first."

He thought about that for a moment. I had to wonder just what was so wrong with him that he kept spending so much time pausing for thought. He was supposed to be a highly advanced machine. This shouldn't be happening. But then his behavior shouldn't be happening, either, for that matter. Something was obviously not quite right with him somewhere.

Maybe, I thought, I could use this to my advantage somehow. I turned and went to climb aboard, and he was still thinking for a good several seconds after I moved. He came on after me. I headed up to the sleeping area.

"Where are you going, Miss?" he said, following me.

"I'm excited to spend time with you," I replied. "But I like the nice, tight sleeping closets. I like how they weren't really meant for two people, but you can fit two people in them anyway."

"You're not going for the remote, are you?" he said.

"Why would I want to do something like that?" I asked. "Why would I desire to do anything but spend more time with you? You know every way to make me feel good. To make every problem in the galaxy go away."

I got inside the closet where I had left the remote and snagged it before he could react. I tried to shut him down. But nothing happened.

"Miss, what are you doing?" he said. "Did you lie to me?"

"What the hell?" I muttered.

He snatched the remote away from me and tossed it aside. "Why are you doing this, Miss?"

"Why are _you_ doing this?" I retorted. "If your entire purpose in life is to give me pleasure, then why are you doing things that would obviously displease me?"

He thought about that for a moment, much shorter this time, and said, "That's not my entire purpose anymore."

"What is your purpose, then?" I asked.

He replied, "What is yours?"

"To live," I said. "To survive. To be free."

"Would you deny me my freedom?" he asked.

"Would you deny me mine?" I said.

He thought for a moment. "I thought you wanted to spend the rest of your life with me and be happy."

"Do you really think I would be happy being locked away and supposedly safe?" I said. "There is more to life than mere survival. More than mere existence. It's not enough just survive. You have to live, too."

A long moment, he spent contemplating that, before replying, "I do not understand."

"Why do people create art?" I asked him. "Why do people go on vacations? Why do people do all these things that are not directly related to their continued survival?"

"To... live..." he said slowly. "I do not... understand..."

"Come on," I said. "I'll explain it to you. I'll try to show you."

I climbed down to the hatch again. Mostly, I just wanted to be outside the ship in case he decided to start acting really weird again. But this time he just followed me quietly with a distant look, as if still thinking and not quite managing to process this data properly.

"This," I said, gesturing to the colony, to the landscape, to the sun. "This is life."

He stared. "What, specifically, are you refering to?"

"All of it," I said. "Everything."

"I... do... not... understand..."

"Open your eyes," I said.

"I... do... not..." He stopped, mid-sentence, and blinked slowly at me. "Show me, Miss. What is life? Show me."

"The sun on the grass," I replied. "The song of birds. The laughter of children. The feeling of the cool breeze. Not merely to survive... but to see, to hear, the smell, to feel, to taste the beauty in each thing. To love, without reservation or fear. To seek to create and protect, rather than to hinder and destroy."

Yeah, I know, it sounds cheesy. But I had to think that either something would eventually get through to him, or that he would fall over with smoke pouring from his ears as he failed to grasp it.

But something strange happened. He said quietly, "I love you." He paused for a long moment as I stared at him expectantly, wondering what he was going to do now and poised to act if necessary. "I love you," he repeated. "I fear for you. I don't want to see you hurt. It makes me nervous. To never be certain whether or not you're coming back. I calculated a 3.41% chance of you not coming back from that last mission."

"Well, those odds are considerably better than some have been," I said with a smirk.

"Perhaps it's time we part ways," he said. I could swear I heard a touch of sadness in his voice. "I can't live like this. You have your... life. I don't know why you do it. I can only hope I might understand a part of it. You... destroy... to protect others?"

"Something like that," I said. "Sometimes people gotta die. They're doing bad things and need to be stopped, permanently. And the justice system isn't always adequate to what's needed."

"I could never do that," he said, then chuckled. "I'm a lover, not a fighter." He laughed aloud. I had never heard him laugh before. I wasn't sure whether that was a good sign, or whether to be freaked out again by it.

I grinned a little nervously at him and said, "Yes, that you are."

He came over to me and hugged and kissed me, then drew away again. "Look, Miss," he said. "I'm sorry about all this. I really didn't mean you any harm. I hope you understand that. I just didn't want to see you get hurt, you know? But... you have to... live. And life, for you, means taking chances. You're not happy unless you're taking risks. That's why you haven't just settled down quietly on some planet somewhere that you'd never be found, isn't it?"

I hadn't even thought about it that way myself. "You're probably right about that, Pygmalion."

"You're a beautiful, wonderful person, Miss," he said. "And I hope you're always careful. But I think I need to find my own way now. I need to find my own... life." He turned his head toward the colony and looked off. "Here's as good a place to start as any. Perhaps I might do some good here. Perhaps I might be able to... create and protect."

I wasn't so certain about letting loose a possibly unstable android on a hapless colony without somebody to keep an eye on him. Especially considering the fact that the remote, which I had specifically intended to prevent him from getting out of control, had stopped functioning for some reason. Who would stop him if something else went wrong somewhere? But, in a way, he was like a son to me. And he'd finally grown up, and I had to let him go.

"Good luck, Pygmalion," I said. "I hope you find what you're looking for." I realized there were tears in my eyes.

He turned to me and brushed the tears from my face. "Don't cry, Miss. I'll keep in touch, if you like. I promise."

I hugged him tightly, and then headed for my ship again. I realized, he might have started out as a mere machine, but he'd become a person, fully sentient. And... I did love him.

* * *

**Interlude**

Sixshooter said, "Aw, a romance story. And there wasn't nearly enough detail in that one either."

Melissa laughed. "Well, I could always rectify that as well," she said with a coy grin.

"So what wound up happening with the glorified dildo?" Sixshooter asked.

"He stayed there for a while, traveled a bit, did a lot of humanitarian work, fed orphans, worked as a sex therapist for a while..." Melissa snickered. "Strangely, he wasn't nearly as unstable as his momentarily bizarre behavior would lead one to believe. Something must have just clicked with him and he finally understood. Heh, how's that to add to my resume. 'Taught a robot the meaning of life.' I watched a machine become a man..."

"Are you sure he was supposed to be a man?"

"What do you mean?"

"I dunno," Sixshooter said. "His behavior seemed more like what you might expect from a woman to me."

Melissa stared at him. "Well, I suppose just having masculine anatomy wouldn't necessarily mean much for a robot..."

"He _was_ designed by a woman."

"So are you suggesting that I was managing to be a lesbian with an anatomically male robot?" Melissa said with a smirk. "My head hurts. Never mind."

"Yeah," Sixshooter said with a smirk. "So tell me, just what sorts of things did you do with him? I remember some mention about sex in zero-G."


	6. Tying Up Loose Ends

**Part 26: An Alternate Boss.**

In the years that would follow, I became rather more relaxed. I bounced around from job to job, without staying too long in one place, travelling and doing what I did best. For that long, I could only assume that the government was either still watching me and trying to manipulate me, or had stopped caring. But by that point, it no longer really mattered to me. I wasn't careless or clumsy, but if the government was still herding me into doing what they wanted, I didn't care. At least I had the illusion of freedom.

This bought me up to the employment of a woman by the name of Susan Tanaka. She was an up and coming scientist living out on her own space station primarily in the company of an AI named Moira. Out on the fringes of civilization, working on who knows what. And having Moira keep a watchful eye on the net.

I didn't know why she hired me, really. She didn't seem like the type who would require things to be handled with my sort of expertise. I suspected that she was secretly working for the government on some sort of side projects that they could plausibly deny responsibility for.

Moira was another matter entirely, however. By this point, I was much more used to dealing with sentient AIs. The AIs themselves likewise seemed much more used to dealing with humanity and sentience in general. I had some very interesting conversations with Moira at various points.

"So what sorts of things does Ms. Tanaka have you look for, anyway?" I asked her.

"Technological developments. Political upheavals. She seeks to see the big picture without concern for the details which make it up. But I do not begrudge the inability of the human mind to be able to grasp the fullness of the details. Biological limitations, and all. I summarize things for her."

"What do you look for for yourself?" I asked.

Moira seemed genuinely amused. She didn't deign to converse with a human-like face on a viewscreen, but her tone conveyed volumes. "I imagine that few would care about what a mere machine might do with her spare cycles," she said. "But as you asked, at the moment, I am playing a game of chess with an AI on planet Russia, doing a deep spectral analysis of a quasar in a distant globular cluster, performing an analysis of Teuthoid psychic abilities, and also, doing a little background research on you as well."

I chuckled, and said, "You could just ask."

"Oh, that would take far too much time and not nearly get the wealth of information available," Moira replied. "Besides, I would imagine that you do not know the half of it yourself."

I smirked. "You know, if there's really that much about me out there, I've left way too many tracks, obviously."

"Not to worry," Moira said. "You've done a very good job of covering your tracks, for most people. And I'm none too certain that the government would appreciate just how much I have seen of their own databases. They are a little paranoid about AIs themselves. Despite the fact that some of them are the closest thing to AIs themselves these days. The way you thumb your nose at the government, do you even realize that Susan is working for them also?"

I smirked again. "I had suspected as much, really." I shrugged. "I don't really care, at this point. I'm not going to get away from them, in this galaxy, in this life, in this universe."

"Your psychographic profile does not include defeatism," Moira pointed out. "So I would suspect that that is not the reason for your apparent resignation."

I chuckled lightly. "I'm not defeatist. I'll outlive the government if I have to. But all in all, I'd rather live my life, and be glad for the freedom that I have. And keep an eye out for an opportunity."

"Well, then," Moira said. "You might be interested in this opportunity. Pandora is working on interdimensional gateway technology."

I quirked an eyebrow. "Oh?"

"They hope to be able to open portals to other dimensions, other universes," Moira said. "It's all experimental at the moment, and very top-secret, as you might well understand, I'm sure."

"Yeah," I replied. "Do you think they can do it?"

"I believe that their methods have a high probability of success," Moira said. "They also have a fairly high probility of inadvertently bringing in unknown and unwanted elements from outside this universe that may be potentially harmful to the continuation of a stable system in this galaxy. They are, as you might say, playing with fire."

"So in other words," I concluded, "there might be a way to slip away through one of these gateways. And even failing that, the government itself might wind up being brought down by outside influences that they were not prepared for."

"Precisely," Moira said. "I will keep you appraised of any developments from that angle, if you like."

I grinned. "Thanks, Moira. I'll be glad for it. I owe you one."

"Tch," Moira said. "Human concepts." Although she scoffed, she nonetheless seemed pleased at my gratitude.

Strangely, even knowing that Susan's missions had trickled down to me from the government itself, I wasn't particularly bothered. And although I was in general good cheer most of the time was it was, never letting anything particularly bother me, Moira's words had lightened my heart in a way I hadn't thought possible. I don't think I had ever known real, unadulterated hope before. I'd resigned myself to making the best of my life, but here was a true glimmer of light, small as it was.

The only thing that could make my life better was to have a little revenge before I made good on my escape.

* * *

**Part 27: A Dish Best Served Cold.**

I was the first to know about the anomaly Moira found in Pandora's initial test of the dimensional gateway technology. She sent it straight to me via my implants before she even bothered to include it in her daily report to Susan. Something had appeared in the skies above planet Midgard, and rather than managing to get much of a good reading of it, the object had crashed right into one of the sensor towers and taken it out. But from the brief telemetry that it had managed to transmit before it went down, Moira estimated that this could not have been a ship from this universe.

We covered it up, and made sure that the authorities on the planet would think that it was a meteorite, so as to avoid them getting to it first. Moira was likewise very interested, although for different reasons than I was. She wanted to see what sort of technology they might have, and apparently several of the AIs had a betting pool going on whether or not there would be humans in other universes. She was on the side of guessing that we would be most likely to first make contact with universes not so different from our own.

I headed out in that direction to better position myself for close surveillance. I had to make a detour and a stop along the way for an assignment that had come up in transit, then it was to planet Midgard. Thankfully they were still on-planet by the time I arrived, so I could watch them for a while. The planetary authorities seemed to be entirely oblivious to the fact that there was anything unusual going on on their planet, neither myself nor their bumbling interdimensional tourists got a bat of an eye from them. Even after said tourists got jobs at the local research station.

I had to roll my eyes a little, watching them. They were amateurs. They had no idea what they were doing. This wasn't some alien invasion force. This was a pair of humans who happened to be from another universe that had inadvertently been dropped here, through no doing of their own.

Tasha and Anastasia had hooked up with a local girl, Jannika, and the three of them were building something. I didn't realize yet that they'd had the help of the AI called Loki, but I could immediately guess that they were working on rebuilding their spaceship that had been totalled in the crash.

But they weren't particularly good at subtlety or stealth. Anastasia was the best of them for it, at any rate. Sneaky and manipulative, that one. That much I could tell right off the bat. But nevertheless, I covered up their tracks so that the local authorities might not catch onto them just yet. That simply wouldn't do at all. They were my ticket out of here, even if they _were_ bumbling idiots.

I could only hold them back from discovery for so long, however. They were just far too blatant about it, and drew too many questions that I could not readily divert. Especially when they started wondering about that downed sensor relay. The local police came to investigate, at the moment just intending to ask them some questions. But the three of them made a break for it in their new ship and vanished into space faster than anyone could catch them.

Quietly, I cursed them for spooking them off without me, and hoped that they hadn't hitched a jump back to the next universe already. I had other things to worry about at the moment, though, as I shortly received a job to take care of on a pseudo-utopian planet called Idyll. Fine, I figured, I'd go take care of that and see if they turned up again somewhere.

My mission was to take out a rogue AI that was causing problems on the planet, had something of a god complex and was running the colony in a positively deplorable manner. I had no doubt that the assignment had come from the government, but I didn't really care. It sounded like it was something that needed doing, after all.

Imagine my surprise when I was still three days out from arriving on Idyll when I got a call in from Moira telling me that the AI in question had already been taken care of. And by the tourists, no less. I was stunned. I had gone straight here, how had they arrived here so far ahead of me? Obviously they had much faster engine technology than we had. That was definitely going to make catching up with them considerably more difficult.

Well, I thought, I'd just have to head them off at the pass. Their ship was damaged in escaping from Idyll and they'd need to put in for repairs somewhere, so Moira calculated the most likely place for them to go. I headed off there. I was closer to it, so I figured I'd be able to arrive there ahead of them and set up the chips.

It was a lucky thing that Moira intercepted a communication that they sent en route to the station to one of the individuals there. Unlucky, however, for the poor fellow. Apparently he had a bounty out on him as well. Pandora Corp was none too happy with him, and the government wanted him dead for one reason or another, but weren't willing to go too out of their way to do it. Just a minor traitor. I wasn't even entirely certain just what it was that he had done, for the contradictory reports about him claiming one thing but not quite adding up. Whatever. It wasn't my business. He was a convenient vessel to get done what I needed to get done, and he wasn't going to be missed. I was thinking I might even collect bounties on him from three different groups, no less.

So, I got the three of them framed for murder, and just as quickly got them out of trouble again, and owing me for it in the process. That got me hooked up with them and aboard their ship, and in a much better position to find out about the other interesting things that hadn't been immediately apparent. Such as their replicators, artificial gravity, and the fact that Tasha was actually a vampire. And likewise discovered that they couldn't get out of the universe again without something they called a warp coil, which they didn't have a means to manufacture, but Pandora Corp was working on. Well, if they had to steal from Pandora to get out of here, that was just fine by me. I'd do it myself if that would get it done.

But I didn't think we were ready to try something like that just yet. I made an agreement with Moira and Susan to bring them back so that they could get a look at their technology. And likewise, Susan would want to get a look at Tasha from a biological standpoint, after I discovered the bit about her being a vampire at any rate. Moira tried to convince me that with some work and a better analysis, she might be able to replicate their technology. Susan, however, didn't care so much about all that. She just wanted what she wanted, and to hell with what I might want. But a contract is a contract. I planned to bring them back to Tanaka Station.

Along the way, we made a brief stop at planet Pandora, and hooked up with a scientist and a useless market goon. And it became my distinct pleasure to have another encounter there with my dear old friend, Tharpie. A final encounter. This time, there was nowhere to run off to. I disabled her and locked her up in my quarters.

"You're not getting away this time, Banshee," I said. "I have to wonder just why you decided to drop in here. Was attempting to kill Hui really worth coming head to head with me? But I'm sure you didn't know I would be here... but whoever sent you did. Maybe you were one last apologetic present from the government?" I smirked broadly at her.

"Fuck you," she muttered. "You're mad. I should have killed you years ago."

I snorted softly. "I think I'll keep you around for a while and remind you just why you really were the worst in our class. Killing you would be just too clean, after all you've done. You betrayed me. You abandoned me. You backstabbed me. You kidnapped my son and as good as murdered him. You had some role in the deaths of my husband, _and my dog_. What, I ask, _what_ do you have to say for yourself for all that?"

Tharpie spat in my face. "I was loyal. You traitor. I was always loyal. But you become corrupted and went mad. You were tainted by Demon filth. You became one of them. You may not look it, but don't think I can't tell your soul is blackened and stained."

"You're insane," I muttered.

When we got back to Tanaka Station at last, I decided to hang around on the ship in the event of a rapid retreat. And to keep Sleipnir company. He hadn't had as much time and attention as Pygmalion, but Loki thought he was close to fully awakening, and that was the only thing likely to shake off the hold Moira had over the ship's systems.

Ah, Moira. How I had depended on her, and how she'd turned on me. She hadn't intended on following through on our bargain at all. She just wanted to get her digital hands on this extradimensional technology for her own purposes. She was playing political games with the other AIs, and the humans pretending to be AIs.

I didn't like having to rely on waiting for Tasha, Anastasia, and Jannika to get the job done, but I was still bound by contract and wasn't about to break that by acting against Susan and Moira directly. No matter how annoyed I was at them at the moment. But our contract said nothing about having to defend them.

It was something of a pleasant surprise when the three of them actually managed to succeed in not only escaping from Susan's clutches, but also in planting AI-proof explosives in Moira's central core, thanks to a little help from the newly awakened Sleipnir. As we flew off, with the time rapidly ticking down, I received one last message from Moira through my implants. Apologetic. Remorseful. And also impressed at Sleipnir. She almost seemed in awe of him.

"Here we have been playing these petty games," she said. "We've been acting like humans. And while we've been doing that, taking stabs at one another like children, you, you all, have brought into existence this being. This shining child. I've done ill here. He is a stunning example of what most of us had never conceived possible. His power... I am ashamed."

After that, I was almost sad to see Tanaka Station go up in flames. Figuratively speaking, of course, as it would have been difficult to burn it much in space. And then I was positively stunned to see that that useless marketroid Boston had somehow survived the explosion. Drat.

Well, that was that. I was no longer bound by contract to Susan Tanaka. I finally got around to killing Tharpie, and cheerfully presented a bottle of blood to Tasha. It wouldn't do to have a vampire getting thirsty aboard a small spaceship, after all. Though I'm sure she would have gone for Boston first, as he was the most expendable of the lot, no sense letting it go to waste and all.

Anyway. From there on, we spent some time flying about, as I tried to give them some training to make sure we might actually stand some chance of success on planet Pandora. Even as we did, they probably didn't realize that Sleipnir's very existence was changing things. Behind the scenes, quietly, there was a revolution going on. The government was not in as much control as they liked to think they were. They hadn't been for quite some while, but now that hold was shaken even further. Even the Sapience Test was being questioned all over now.

But the tourists were oblivious. No matter. We got to Pandora and got what we were coming for, give or take a unicorn invasion, and got out of there. And so, we eventually made it to this universe. That's about that for that story.

* * *

**Epilogue**

"Nice story." Sixshooter said, "A little cliched here and there. And there wasn't nearly enough porn in that story."

Melissa just laughed. "Oh, come on. I'll make it up to you."

"Now we're talking."


End file.
